Search Results for “lightning”

Welcome, Lightning!

January 15, 2009 |

Last Saturday was a cold, snowy day here in Brooklyn, so what did Juli and I do? We went for a walk. Obviously. We went for bagels and then to the bookstore and then to get hot chocolate. All in all it was an adorable day. Then she asked, “Can we go up and look at hamsters? It’s kind of a long walk…”

To which I replied, “Sure. Let’s roll.”

So we went up to the pet store on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint to look at hamsters. We saw little hamsters and black hamsters and gray hamsters and pregnant hamsters and a few hamsters that were the size of small dogs. But in the end, Juli settled on a little black hamster that was only a few weeks old. We decided to name him Lightning because A) that’s an awesome name and B) he has a streak of white down his chest. He’s been very nervous the last few days, so we’ve avoided picking him up or disturbing him too much so he can acclimate to his new environment better. He’s very little and has been hiding, but is growing more adventurous and less timid.

Here is the first photo I managed to take of him.

Here’s a more clear photo.

Here are the rest of the selects.

Isn’t he little? I have tremendous faith that he will turn out to be a very special hamster.

Photo tally for 2009: 23/5000

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ACT I, Scene I

ACT I, Scene I

January 26, 2021 |

Life and Thoughts

ACT I

SCENE I. A desert place.

Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches

First Witch

When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

Second Witch

When the hurlyburly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.

Third Witch

That will be ere the set of sun.

First Witch

Where the place?

Second Witch

Upon the heath.

Third Witch

There to meet with Macbeth.

First Witch

I come, Graymalkin!

Second Witch

Paddock calls.

Third Witch

Anon.

ALL

Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.

Exeunt

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Chromeo, the pouring rain, and perseverance.

August 24, 2010 |

About Music and Music

On Sunday, Charles and I went to see the Chromeo show I had mentioned here before. The day was grey and threatened rain. The air was thick and humid. The forecast called for lightning. Undeterred we set out at around 12:30 to get in line. The doors were supposed to open at 2:00, but, both being relentlessly on time for everything, we wanted to get there early. And not unreasonably, I might add, since the Pool Parties things typically get very crowded very quickly. We were just acting in a prudent manner. Business.

We got into line very near the front. We were excited to be so close to the gate even though we could have easily been much further back and still been guaranteed admission. But, fuck it, we were pumped. Neither of us had ever seen Chromeo before and you cannot deny a free show. You just can’t.

And then, sometime just after 1, it started to rain.

Now, I’m not talking about that bullshit rain Californians get so upset about during the winter. No, I’m talking some motherfucking god damned 40 days and 40 nights DOWNPOUR. Raindrops like golf balls. Flooded streets, gale force winds, umbrellas torn to shreds, and there were Joe and Charles, without any sort of protection from the elements, getting absolutely drenched. But were we deterred?

No! Never!

We stood there literally for hours in the rain. When 2 came and went and the rain showed no sign of slowing, Charles very nearly hit his breaking point and asked if maybe we should call it. I stood firm, however, and made it known that I would not move until they told us the show was going on, it was being moved, or it was cancelled.

Shortly after 3, the rain abated a bit, and yet we waited in line for some spec of info. Was the show going on? Was it moving? So many people had given up and left for the dryness and safety of home. Fools! They missed the doors finally opening around 3:30 and we poured in. I made a beeline for the beer table as standing in the rain for hours had developed in my a considerable thirst which would only be quenched by beer. And, beer in hand, the show began as it was supposed to, minor delay notwithstanding. Here are my thoughts.

Telephoned

Is it me or does opening your set with a cover song seem like a fucking stupid idea? The best part of the set was when the wind blew the DJ’s records off the turntables. I described them to one of the dudes I met in line as drum & bass karaoke. Forgettable.

The Suzan

I think I might have enjoyed The Suzan better if I was a 14 year old Japanese schoolgirl. Now, I’m not saying they were bad; they weren’t. It’s just that their brand of stupefyingly sweet bubblegum pop really does nothing at all for me. Maybe I don’t have enough Hello Kitty shit in my house, but there’s something about their music that gave me a toothache and made me worry I might need a root canal.

If you like this sort of thing, then good for you. Check these ladies out. They are by no means bad, just not my style.

Kid Sister

This is where the show really picked up for me. I’ve listened to Kid Sister’s record and it’s pretty good, I guess, but not something I would get behind and recommend to someone. It’s fine, but, I don’t know, not all that exciting really.

But, god damn, Kid Sister brings it live. I don’t care if you’re a fan of her records, but if you like to see a damned good show that’ll make you dance and want to F&F, then this is your jam. I don’t really have much else to say about the set except that it was awesome. A very nice surprise on a rainy day since I really had no expectations of her whatsoever. And, DAMN, watch that girl dance.

Chromeo

Through the three previous sets I had stood on the beer side of the venue. It’s weird. They have two separate sections: the stage area and the beer area. You can’t take beers to the stage side for some inane reason, but you can hear and see just fine from the beer side. Priorities straight, I stayed on the beer side for the three sets I hadn’t stood in pouring rain to see. Even better because it gave me and Charles plenty of space to dance during Kid Sister. We looked at the crowd and felt confident that between sets we’d be able to push our way to very near the front of the crowd. Not all the way, because then you have to look up, but like 15 or 20 feet back.

Of course, we were right. Years of metal shows teach you how to walk through a crowd.

We were right where we wanted to be when Chromeo came on to the stage. I maintain that these guys are our generation’s Hall & Oates. Pop funk duo taking cues from classic R&B? They just write more electro types of songs. All the blogs I’ve been reading call these guys joke-funk, but that just seems like a lazy description to me. Like one blogger wrote it, another read and stole it, and then the term spread. I like to think of Chromeo as good old party music. Does everything need to be a god damned ironic, tongue-in-cheek in-joke these days? Why not just allow for the possibility that these two French Canadians wrote great, catchy as hell, funky pop songs? I don’t think there’s anything that’s a joke about their music at all. Sure, they have fun, but that doesn’t make them a joke. Not everyone needs to be John Cage or Gaahl.

If I remember correctly, they started with “Tenderoni” but I honestly have no idea. It might have been another song. I do know that they played my favorite song of theirs, “Bonafied Loving,” and that they played “Night By Night.” Their performance was pretty damned tight, even if they had to cue about half the instruments from Dave 1’s laptop on the stage. Too many layers of shit going on not to either have a backing band or to have your laptop pumping out the jams. They chose the latter.

Luckily, it didn’t detract at all. Their energy on stage was infectious. The crowd danced and screamed and yelled and jumped and threw their hands into the air with wild abandon. It’s rare you get a crowd that is as into the band as this crowd was into Chromeo. I suppose there’s something about standing around in the rain for hours that brings the best out in people.

All in all, it was an amazing show. To my friends who were here in Brooklyn and decided not to come out because they were afraid of the rain, sucks to be you. You missed an awesome afternoon, an awesome adventure, and an awesome show. Maybe next summer you can catch the Pool Party again. OH WAIT. This is probably the last year! OOOH sting!

And, because I know you want to see more coverage of the show, here it is:

Brooklyn Vegan – Chromeo, Kid Sister, The Suzan & Telephoned played the Pool in the rain (Williamsburg Waterfront pics)

The Village Voice – Live: Chromeo Thrill A Soaked, Oft-Shoeless Jelly Pool Party Crowd With Rampant Corniness

The Village Voice – Brooklyn, This Is Your Rain Dance: Rating Audience Moves at Yesterday’s Chromeo Pool Party

The Village Voice – Pool Party with Chromeo Gallery (Can you find me in this gallery?! hint)

Stereogum – Chromeo, Kid Sister @ JellyNYC Pool Party, Williamsburg Waterfront 8/22/10

See you next time!

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RJD, now and forever.

May 17, 2010 |

About Music, Music and Thoughts

When there’s lightning, you know it always brings me down….

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25 – His Blood Was Boiling

December 6, 2009 |

Fiction and Writing

His blood was boiling. He could not take his eyes off them. Everywhere. Every unrestrained jiggle. Every poorly padded nipple. Every sweet, shapely ass. Every curve, every bulge, every stolen glance down the shirt. His blood seethed right behind the eyeballs and his lizard brain screamed its primordial mating call in the subconscious recesses of his self. There were beautiful women everywhere and he felt utterly powerless to resist them. The streets were a minefield of libidinous hazards. He had to hide or he feared his head might explode, hormones rushing through him, torrential, violent, powerful.

Yet, sitting there alone in the cafe sipping his tepid coffee and staring at the buxom brunette with the fancy Italian-named drink he could never hope to pronounce correctly, he suddenly felt very old. His suit felt like shackles, the unfulfilled dream of his squandered youth. His graying hair another reminder of his drained virility. His belly hanging over his 15 dollar belt a harbinger of the end. His sad, useless life in decline.

He wanted so badly to bury his face between the young supple breasts of the brunette he had been staring at for almost an hour that he could almost feel the warmth of her breath on his threadbare scalp and smell the secret drop of perfume he suspected she placed in her cleavage, a reward for any man lucky enough to find his nose there. But not for him. Never for him. His days of unrestrained lust were behind him, memories of the way things should have been but were not. Now he was relegated to the role of suffering silent observer. There was not a woman in the whole world that would look upon his tired paunch with desire and he knew it. And he felt it. He felt it in the very core of his loins. Everything was lost.

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23 – These Fists

December 4, 2009 |

Fiction and Writing

These fists. These fists have known such discord as I cannot begin to recount. In times before men lived upon this land, I rode across it, aimless. I knew neither form nor consciousness, yet I was. I remember those times, but I do not remember being. And then the first men crossed the ice bridge in the north and spread down, adapting, changing, learning to live in this hostile, giving land. And they told stories of the wind and the night and the lightning and the thunder. They told stories of the great tusked beasts that roamed the land, of the fire that burnt the forests, of the place they went when they died. They sought to make sense of so many things they knew nothing about, so they used what they knew—the animals, the birds, the seasons, the plants. Each little group of these men created a web of stories, of belief, about the genesis of this place. They created symbols to explain the inexplicable. They gave names to the things and places and moments and stars that had no names, never knew they needed to be named. It was then that I took form, though I was and am known by many different names to many different people. As the years progress, I am known less and less. My form has become a blending of so many cultures and traditions and ideas, the sum of so many thoughts, that I have become hard to recognize to all except the most attune to the natural world. The modernization of the world has drained my once vibrant colors. So few still believe, but I shall never cease to be for deep within them they know I am there. To some, I am a benefactor, bringing with me change and growth and development. To others, I am a malefactor, ushering in the end of an age, the death of what they had always known. To be fair, I have never been either of these things. My role is subject to their interpretation, to the context of the situation. I only am. I will only be. I will continue to ride as long as the sun rises and sets.

And though I am impartial, my time amongst the people has imbued me with something like what they call emotion. I have found myself taking part in their struggles, often against my better judgment. When I have had time to stop and think about it—such a strange thing thinking—I recognized that my role is only to lead the change, not to fight for or against it. Yet that is what I do. I take sides. While so many people thought I was preventing change from taking place, I knew that change would happen regardless. Nothing can stop the change once it begins.

And here, again, I embarked on this cycle of change and rebirth, the cycle of death and destruction, leading the vanguard of discord to welcome an era of concord in my wake. But on whose side shall I fight? Whose blood shall I spill? What shape shall the future take when my role, for the moment, is done?

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Thoughts on the Hunter open house last night.

November 4, 2009 |

About Writing and Writing

Last night, as many of you who keep tabs on the goings on in my life outside the professional realm know, was the open house for the 2010 applications to Hunter’s Creative Writing MFA program. After the disappointing results of last year’s application, I am ready and primed and pumped and revved about this year’s round. It was not nearly as severe of information-overload as last year, which is nice. Many of the things I wrote about here were confirmed by faculty and student alike. I need to allow for the natural tendencies and rawness and voice in my writing to “jump off the page” as they were fond of saying last night. The Black Laser provides plenty of evidence that this is not a problem for me. On a(n almost) daily basis I write for you, my loyal legion of followers and well-wishers, in a voice that I think rather adeptly echoes the way I speak. Probably fewer “fucks”, but whatever. The trick—not that it’s a trick, more of an approach, really—with my fiction will be not to work it so hard that I end up neutering the natural cadence and flow of the words. I need to edit for clarity and mistakes, but not worry that something might come off as too TOO, you know what I mean? See that sentence? I probably need to edit it for clarity, but fuck it. My writing needs to be functional and raw and exciting; polish can come later.

Last year I imposed hiatus on myself and then worked exclusively on one piece for months—thinking, writing, rewriting, and revising an idea I’d had while sitting at brunch with Juli some months before. It ended up being a very limiting process for me and didn’t allow me to play around with the piece as I ought to have. And I think the piece suffered for it, as I described in my previous post on the topic.

This year I intend to approach this creative submission process differently. I also have a number of things going for me this year over last year. First, I’m freelance, meaning I have more flexibility in deciding my schedule if I need to. Of course, if works comes up, I’ll take it, because The Black Laser can’t live off lightning and fear. Even he needs to eat. Second, I have the experience of the process last year to inform the decisions I make this year. Third, I don’t have to worry about getting my transcripts and letters of recommendation again. If I have to apply a third time, I will, but let’s think about that if that happens, yes? Fourth, and most importantly, I have the perfect venue for trying out ideas for my final piece—The Year of 5000 Photos and 50 Short Stories.

Oh, right, remember that? A quick check in the right hand column will show that I’ve made admirable progress on my photos, but my poor stories have languished. Poor stories. And, with fewer than 60 days left in 2009 (where has it gone?!), if I’m to live up to my end of the bargain, I need to get going.

From here on out, I will be writing every night, at least 500 words. If I can do more than that, I will, but 500 will be my minimum. I often get stuck thinking, “Man, I have nothing to write about. Where are the ideas?” and I get all hung up and stupid and don’t do anything. For the rest of the year, if I have nothing new to write about, I will rewrite old ideas or someone else’s ideas or ideas I thought were dumb, just to keep my fingers moving. If I am not working, then I will try and do two rounds of 500 words, one first thing in the morning, followed by a walk, and then another 500 hundred. Quality is less important than producing regularly. If I am able to crank out 47 more short stories this year, then somewhere within that body I will have something worth editing or turning into something more for the purpose of the application due February 1, 2010.

Come the new year I am going to turn my attention toward getting the personal statement finished and whipping the creative submission into shape. I haven’t forgotten my idea of reading the first 20-25 pages of books either, mind you, but I might have to push that back until after 1/1/10. January will be a busy month for me trying to get all this stuff done, but I can do it. I can DO IT. I mean, the one student last night has two children, 3 and 6 months, a full time job, a husband, and still manages to get her MFA work done. Impressive. I’m not even committing to CLOSE to that kind of schedule. I can do it!

Don’t forget that I have to fit The Frontiersman’s Wife in here too. At the very least, baseball will be over soon and that time sink won’t be around to distract me anymore.

We have embarked on an exciting end-of-2009, Black Laserites! Keep reading!

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7 search results for “lightning”

ACT I

SCENE I. A desert place.