Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts published in January 2010

01 – Of Friends and Lovers

January 28, 2010 |

Fiction and Writing

In front of me on the altar lies my best friend Arturo, cold, grey, and dead in a box.  Arturo’s mother cries throughout the service, silently soaking her dainty handkerchief with tears and snot.  Beside her, his father holds the sans-handkerchief hand, looking stoic and strong, but the heavy lines of his face reveal the war this tragedy has caused inside his head.  Oh, poor babies.  Is it wrong to feel so little when so many people are mourning?

His sister Eva—god, she looks tight today in that black dress—speaks after the priest gives his eulogy, generic but comforting to those who would have it.  She is so sincere.  I am impressed.  She says they all miss Arturo, his bright smile, his laugh, his winning attitude.  That it is such a tragedy to have one so young taken from them before he had the chance to affect the world.  Cut down in the spring time of his life.  Strong and handsome, Arturo was a man who loved his family, his friends, his country, his God.  

I zone out.  

I imagine the taste of her lip gloss on my lips, something fruity, sparkles smeared on my face.  I try and imagine the color of her panties.  I stare at her tits gently jiggling in her dress as she gesticulates meaningfully during her speech, adding appropriate emphasis to the most poignant, heart-felt moments, when his auntie who is sitting next to me grabs my hand and looks deeply into my eyes.  Hers are filled with tears, red, swollen.  I do my best to play it like I have been captivated by Eva’s words rather than staring at her amazing rack, but the woman is so lost in her sadness that I could have been screaming and cursing and throwing things across the church pews and she still would have thought I was displaying a sensible expression of grief over Arturo, my sweet lost best friend.

Eva finishes and sits and some cousin who I have never met comes up and plays some sad sounding song on the piano I don’t know but which really opens the water works in the crowd.  I hide my face in my hands to avoid any more sincere exchanges of misery.  I close my eyes, enjoying the darkness, and press my palms hard into my eye sockets.  Hopefully the redness the pressure causes will be enough to convince people I have been suffering silently, tears barely held back in this moment of extreme loss.  

Oh, poor Arturo.  If only you were here to see how hot your sister looks today.

With my head swimming, full of Eva, I notice myself coming to half-mast—probably best not to stand up from the pew with a boner—I fill my head with all the unsexy thoughts I can muster: my sixth grade homeroom teacher, the homeless man who used to pee on my window and then shit himself while napping on my block, taxes, the rotten fish smell of the wharf on a hot summer day.  I focus so hard on not getting hard that I barely notice when the funeral procession begins.  Arturo’s dad passes me, misinterprets my attempts to thwart my erection as grief-induced detachment, and places his hand on my shoulder in a show of support.  

“Come, David,” he says, “let’s pay our final respects.”

I look up at him, my eyes still glazed and red from the pressure of my palms, and nod silently.  As one of the pallbearers—it’s me, his father, three of his male cousins, and some ridiculous curly haired guy he went to college with—I take my place at the head of casket opposite his father, good old Gus, and cast my eyes across the solemn, expectant crowd.  They are all miserable.  I hope that none of them can tell that I feel nothing for Arturo right now.  It is the living sibling I am more concerned with at this point.

I catch Eva’s eyes and think I read the briefest glimmer of a message there.  Hope for later?  A promise?  Is she thinking about me as much as I am thinking about her?  I shudder and close my eyes, my lips pursed, and swallow hard.  I conjure unsexy thoughts at a heretofore unreached pinnacle of torturousness.  I grimace at the choice scenes playing across my mind’s eye.

Gus catches my revealing facial expression and says to me, “It’s ok.  You can let it out, son.  It’s ok to let go.”  Gus, if I let go of the careful mental balancing act happening inside my head right now, I would bear your son’s coffin down this aisle with my cock like diamond, laughing at how stupid you all look.

I decide against letting go.

The casket lifts slightly and I take the cue and we start leading it down the aisle of the Roman Catholic church holding the service, with its idols and stations of the cross and blood sacrifice.  Roman Catholics are a strange bunch.  I do not and will never fully understand their mysteries.  Gus is a believer though, and Arturo’s mom, Adoracion, well, just look at her name.  I feign it for them, if only so they don’t suspect.

We make it halfway down the aisle when a woman wails and throws herself on the coffin.  Her weight makes my arm hurt.  I turn and place my other hand on her and realize that it is Adoracion in the flesh.  She grabs my lapels, tears streaming down her cheeks, and collapses into me.  Eva grabs her mother and I hand her off, but not before Eva lightly brushes my hand with her own.  I nod to them both with as much gravitas as I can muster and continue down the aisle, my hand still tingling from the electricity in Eva’s touch.

A hearse waits for us at the bottom of the stairs leading down from the entrance of the church.  Much of the audience, if you want to call them that, lines the stairs on either side of the path to the hearse.  The rest of the onlookers file out behind us.  Solemnly, with tremendous weight and importance, we lead the wood and metal box containing the sad, empty flesh of poor, sweet Arturo into the back of the hearse and shut the rear door.  Tears erupt in the crowd when the latch connects, signaling the very last car ride Arturo will ever take.  I am tempted to call shotgun.

Read the rest of “Of Friends and Lovers” here.

> Continue reading...01 – Of Friends and Lovers

Famous Literary Addicts

January 27, 2010 |

About Writing, Thoughts and Writing

This story is making the rounds today, but I thought it was cool enough to share.

There’s no secret that substance abuse has always traveled hand in hand with people in the literary world. It’s just a thing. It doesn’t make it ok, but it’s fascinating nevertheless. For example, did you know that Ayn Rand was addicted to speed? No, neither did I. But here she is, looking a little crispy around the edges.

It's the eyes, man.

Intense.

Life has posted a gallery of famous literary addicts. I knew that Burroughs was a junk addict, but I had no idea that Louisa May Alcott (of Little Women fame) was too. Wild!

Famous Literary Drunks & Addicts

Check it out.

> Continue reading...Famous Literary Addicts

Power Metal & Me, or, Why I Cannot Take Myself Too Seriously

January 26, 2010 |

About Music and Music

Over at Invisible Oranges today, Cosmo Lee is further exploring his distaste for power metal. Personally, I like power metal. It’s cheesy and stupid and ridiculous, but it is also totally awesome. It’s like you’ve got a bunch of dudes sitting around after an epic campaign of AD&D (2nd ruleset, duh) and they’re all talking about how to make the most epic metal ever.

“Well guys, we probably need operatic vocals,” says one.

“And probably powerful sweeping guitars,” says another.

“And the guitars could have solo battles with the synthesizers,” says a third.

“Yeah, that would be rad,” says the first.

“And we probably need a constant barrage of double bass drums,” says yet another.

“And our lyrics should be about elves and unicorns and dragons and shit.”

And thus was Power Metal born into this world. If ever there was a metal genre filled with earnest as hell guys pursuing the impossible dream by making the silliest, unicorn-filled music ever, it is Power Metal.

Here is a selection of some of my favorites of the genre. Let’s start with Rhapsody, perhaps THE awesome, MOST ridiculous Power Metal band of all time. Even better, they’re Italian. This is “Power of the Dragonflame.” Is that not an awesome song title?

Next is Demons & Wizards, probably my first intro to true modern Power Metal. My friend Deegan came over one day and was all, “Dude, do you have Napster?” and I was all, “Over dial up, yeah,” and he was all, “Dude, find a song called ‘Poor Man’s Crusade’ right now,” and I was all, “Ok.” Well, I did and it was AWESOME.

This song, “Fiddler on the Green,” is from the same record. It is, I think my favorite song on the record and has a 3 and a half minute build to insanely powerful power metal magic.

Star One is a one-off side project by Anthony Arjen Lucassen of Ayreon. The record, called “Space Metal,” is a Power Metal concept record based on Science Fiction movies.

Wait. Read that again.

A POWER METAL CONCEPT RECORD BASED ON SCIENCE FICTION MOVIES. What the fucking fuck? That is so awesome. Films include Stargate, Star Wars, and fucking Dune. Honestly, I can’t think of anything that combines dork and awesome more perfectly.

Here’s a fan-made video for “Eye of Ra” from that record.

Dream Evil, who I posted one below this one, is a Swedish Power Metal band I saw for the first time live playing with Carnal Forge, Testament, Immortal, and Rob Halford—a strange line up to be sure. But they totally rock. Here’s “Fire, Battle, Metal!”

Hammerfall is another band doing epic heavy cheese as well as anyone and they totally rock. This is “Renegade.”

With this light survey of Power Metal under our belts, what do we now understand. For me, Power Metal is awesome if you are able to relax and not take yourself too seriously. While I think that there are guys in this scene who live and breathe this shit, I also think there’s a significant contingent of guys who are laughing right along with the fans. Sometimes you can make and enjoy things just because they’re fun. That, more than unicorns and dragons and elves and trolls, is what Power Metal is about for me. I love Pig Destroyer, but my music doesn’t always have to be so serious.

> Continue reading...Power Metal & Me, or, Why I Cannot Take Myself Too Seriously

Tyson (2008)

January 25, 2010 |

About Filmmaking and Film & TV

Wow.

Last night Juli and I watched Tyson, a documentary on the legendary and oft reviled boxer, Mike Tyson. It was quite an illuminating experience and really helped flesh out the character of Mike Tyson in my brain. Before the film, all I really could have told you about him could easily be summed up in the following list.

  • He was a boxer.
  • He went to prison.
  • Mike Tyson’s Punch Out.
  • Don King.
  • Robin Givens.
  • Face tattoo.

Comprehensive, right?

Now, the film struck me in two distinct ways. First is that is has humanized Mike Tyson for me. Where once he was this media icon, a person I heard about on the news but about whom I knew nothing, now I feel like after hearing his nearly incomprehensible, insane rambling for 90 minutes I understand him for what he really is: a frightened man-child who was thrown into a world he had no tools for coping with where people wanted to take advantage of him because he was able to dominate guys in a boxing ring. It seems clear that this man who can barely form a coherent sentence, nearly breaks down crying when talking about his childhood in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and whose minds wanders wildly onto all sorts of tangents is ill equipped to deal with the world on any level, much less a high demand career surrounded by men trying to use him to fill their bank accounts. What Mike Tyson needed was a mentor and a hug, not managers and trainers and millions of dollars.

Of course, I’m not excusing his behavior. There is no doubt that he has done some terrible things in his life. He readily admits this, in fact, explaining his explosiveness after release from prison as being driven by the fear of never wanting to be back in that position of powerlessness again. Really, it is an extension of his childhood fears resulting from growing up in the ghetto and constantly having to fight physically and mentally not to get killed. You can see when he talks about it that he’s pretty messed up inside, confused, angry, uncertain. You can tell when his speech degenerates from his normal bumbling patterns of repeated phrases and half finished sentences to venom filled curses that he is, if nothing else, being honest about his feelings.

Tyson’s is a harrowing story of what can happen to people when the enter into a world of fame and riches without the grounding needed to cope. It’s really sad that this man who was indomitable in the ring was eventually brought down because, as a person, he was incapable of making sane, healthy decisions for himself. I know that sounds like a truism, but in Tyson’s case, it’s rather acute. The peaks of his successes and the valleys of his defeats are so much more extreme than what most people could ever dream of experiencing that his tale serves as almost like this abstract object lesson, this parable of how not to live your life.

Second, what struck me about the film was that it really doesn’t follow traditional documentary techniques. Based on Tyson’s clothes and the set ups, it’s like they had four or five days of one on one interview with the man and then used that interview SOLELY as the basis for the film. Where as other films might get interviews with people from his past, from his current life, director James Toback has used only Tyson’s words, along with a smattering or archival footage, to tell the story. It is incredibly effective. To enhance the sense that the inside of Tyson’s head is a jumbled mess, Toback overlaps sections of the interview both visually and temporally with bits of dialog coming in on top of each other and trailing off, a web of ideas and thoughts barely distinguishable from the next.

So, long story short, go see it. You have no excuse.

> Continue reading...<i>Tyson</i> (2008)

New Old School Death Metal (NOSDM)

January 20, 2010 |

About Music and Music

Today I learned about a genre of metal called “New Old School Death Metal” or NOSDM. While I think the resurgence of old school style Death Metal is awesome, I’m a little surprised by it. Had it really gone anywhere? I was always of the opinion that since its inception, there have been dudes playing Death Metal the same way. Sure, the bands change and the members of the bands change, but hasn’t there always been a core of old school Death going on somewhere?

Did I miss out on something? Was I too busy listening to Old Old School Death Metal (OOSDM) records to notice?

Did Death Metal change so much that we’re experiencing a revival of the classic form much in the same manner as thrash suddenly became huge again about three years ago? Do we refer to Municipal Waste and Toxic Holocaust as “New Old School Thrash Metal” or NOSTM? Are all these labels really necessary? If we didn’t call these new DM bands NOSDM, but just plain called them Death Metal, would it be so hard to understand? Would it be wrong?

Let’s posit that Death Metal in its traditional form peaked about 1994, to be superseded by the Swedish style that dominated the later 90s and early 00s. (No, nü-metal doesn’t fucking count.) The earliest known uses of the term “Death Metal” were found somewhere around 1984, giving Death Metal a 10 year run. Now, if a style falls out of favor but does not disappear completely, can we really call its resurgence by a new name? Composers wrote Baroque music for 160 years. It’s not like when Baroque first showed up, went through a wave of initial popularity, decreased slightly in public opinion, and then showed up again they called it New Old School Baroque Music (NOSBM), did they?

The whole thing, and really the extreme fragmentation of metal subgenres in general, seems pretty silly to me.

And, because I am such a caring person, I won’t let you go without some examples.

Let’s do a chronological survey of some of my favorite Death Metal, shall we?

1987’s “Beyond the Unholy Grave” – Death
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/11-Beyond-The-Unholy-Grave.mp3|Artists=Death|titles=Beyond The Unholy Grave]

1987’s “Bleed for the Devil” – Morbid Angel
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/1-07 Bleed For The Devil.mp3|artists=Morbid Angel|titles=Bleed for the Devil]

1989’s “Sacrificial Suicide” – Deicide
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/02-Sacrificial-Suicide.mp3|artists=Deicide|titles=Sacrificial Suicide]

1990’s “Burden of Evil” – Monstrosity
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Burden Of Evil.mp3|artists=Monstrosity|titles=Burden of Evil]

1991’s “Jesus Wept” – Suffocation
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/09 Jesus Wept.mp3|artists=Suffocation|titles=Jesus Wept]

1992’s “Hammer Smashed Face” – Cannibal Corpse
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Hammer Smashed Face.mp3|artists=Cannibal Corpse|titles=Hammer Smashed Face]

1993’s “Preacher of Sodomy” – Broken Hope
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Preacher of Sodomy.mp3|artists=Broken Hope|titles=Preacher of Sodomy]

1994’s “Born Headless” – Cryptopsy
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Born Headless.mp3|artists=Cryptopsy|titles=Born Headless]

1995’s “Nothing But Fear” – Morbid Angel
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Nothing But Fear.mp3|artists=Morbid Angel|titles=Nothing But Fear]

1996’s “Permanently Disfigured” – Dying Fetus
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Permanently Disfigured.mp3|artists=Dying Fetus|titles=Permanently Disfigured]

1997’s “Save To The Cross” – Deicide
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Slave To The Cross.mp3|artists=Deicide|titles=Slave To The Cross]

1998’s “Flame To The Surface” – Cryptopsy
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Flame To The Surface.mp3|artists=Cryptopsy|titles=Flame To The Surface]

1999’s “Blowtorch Slaughter” – Cannibal Corpse
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Blowtorch Slaughter.mp3|artists=Cannibal Corpse|titles=Blowtorch Slaughter]

2000’s “Christians To The Lions” – Behemoth
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Christians To The Lions.mp3|artists=Behemoth|titles=Christians To The Lions]

2001’s “Blind The Vision That Shatters” – Neuraxis
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Blind The Vision That Shatters.mp3|artists=Neuraxis|titles=Blind The Vision That Shatters]

2002’s “Dead Sea Scroll Deception” – Lock Up
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Dead Sea Scroll Deception.mp3|artists=Lock Up|titles=Dead Sea Scroll Deception]

2003’s “History Is Rotten” – Misery Index
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/History Is Rotten.mp3|artists=Misery Index|titles=History Is Rotten]

2004’s “Sensual Sickness” – Decapitated
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Sensual Sickness.mp3|artists=Decapitated|titles=Sensual Sickness]

2005’s “The Victorious Reign” – Hate Eternal
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/The Victorious Reign.mp3|artists=Hate Eternal|titles=The Victorious Reign]

2006’s “The Crawl Inside Me Uninvited” – Coldworker
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/They Crawl Inside Me Uninvited.mp3|artists=Coldworker|titles=They Crawl Inside Me Uninvited]

2007’s “Rebirth In Blood” – Blood Red Throne
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Rebirth In Blood.mp3|artists=Blood Red Throne|titles=Rebirth In Blood]

2008’s “Slaughtering The Will To Live” – Bloodbath
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Slaughtering The Will To Live.mp3|artists=Bloodbath|titles=Slaughtering The Will To Live]

2009’s “Carrion Sculpted Entity” – Cannibal Corpse
[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Carrion Sculpted Entity.mp3|artists=Cannibal Corpse|titles=Carrion Sculpted Entity]

Sorry, for some reason I don’t have any Death Metal from 1988 on my iPod right now. I’ll fix that oversight when I get home tonight.

Now, listen to the bands on an article by Decibel Magazine about NOSDM. It seems to me that besides some basic evolution in the quality of the productions, that Death Metal has been alive an well since at least 1987. So, do we need this new label at all? Can we not just keep calling it Death Metal? Do we need OOSDM, MEOSDM (Mid-Era Old School Death Metal), and NOSDM? What happens when NOSDM becomes Old New Old School Death Metal (ONOSDM)?

For the initiated and uninitiated out there who take the time to read and listen to this, what do you think? Comment away.

> Continue reading...New Old School Death Metal (NOSDM)