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The Black Laser

Serendipity and the remembering of things.

April 13, 2010 |

About Music, Music and Thoughts

Last night I was at The Belmont Lounge for my friend Dumaine’s birthday party. We arrived just a little after 8 right in the middle of some sort of unsigned R&B/hip hop artist showcase which sounded like an open mic, but wasn’t. Dumaine and his fye-ance Erika had reserved a table in anticipation of the friends who would eventually show up. A smart move, I think. We spoke to the hostess and got her to seat us at the table. Apparently, the woman running the showcase had placed some record company folks, whatever the HELL that means, at the table with the delicately lettered “Reserved” sign on it. When the hostess did her job and moved the record company folks to seat us, this woman raised a hell of a stink.

Instead of doing the right thing and saying, “Hey, you know, I know you have this table reserved and everything, but I would love for these folks to be able to see the rest of the show from here since I’d love for my performers to make some sort of deal with them. Would you mind if they stayed here?”

You know what we would have said? We’d have said, “Of course! No problem. There’s only three of us right now and we’d be happy to share the table for the remainder of the show.”

But, no. She had to pull the passive aggressive card and give us stink eye all night and bitch to the staff and call us out on the microphone. We were polite and didn’t let her bother us, because, really, what’s worse for people who are passive aggressive than to reply to them with straight positivity and politeness?

We sat and listened to the second half of the show. After 2 or 3 7 dollar Brooklyn Lager bottles (I know, right, what the fuck), I’m getting lost in my own head a little as all this not-very-good R&B blares through the bar. Conversation was impossible with the volume, so all I had was my own brain. Luckily, at this point, we’re friends.

I recognized that every song we heard was about how much the singer loved someone and how they either wanted to spend their lives with the other person or how they were the most beautiful in the world or how they wanted to take them home and sleep with them or whatever. You get it, I think. It was all hyperbole and adolescent descriptions of love and relationships. Kind of silly, really. Not realistic at all.

I got to thinking that it would be really awesome to do a song in the same style where the guy basically told the woman that she was all right, maybe a little annoying, but that he liked fucking her. That he didn’t want it to get too serious since he really couldn’t see them in a relationship. That he thought she was ok, but not really that great and, in the end, he didn’t care too much about her and that she’d probably be better off with someone who respected her. All of it sung in that “I can’t just hold a single note” style of modern R&B singers that I dislike so much. It’s like constant vocal gymnastics that seems to me more often cover up the fact that the singer’s not really hitting the note they’re trying to hit. Instead of just singing, they’re masking that they can’t sing. But whatever.

On the way in to work this morning I was thinking about the song still when I realized that I already KNEW a song like that. Funny, right? It took me 12 hours to process that the song I thought would be so funny pretty much exists. Here it is.

[audio:https://www.theblacklaser.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Our-Love-Would-Be-Much-Better-If-I-Gave-A-Damn-About-You.mp3|artists=Dag|titles=Our Love Would Be Much Better (If I Gave a Damn About You)]

Now, the Dag track isn’t quite exactly perfect, but it’s pretty close. Do any of you brilliant people out there have any songs like this? Let’s start a collection!

> Continue reading...Serendipity and the remembering of things.

Thoughts on the move.

April 8, 2010 |

Thoughts

Last Saturday, a lovely warm spring day by any account, I moved from my old apartment where I had lived since April of 2005 into my new apartment in Greenpoint. From Williamsburg to Greenpoint. Maybe that’s what I’ll call my memoirs one day. It’s good to have a title in mind all the time, I think.

With the selfless help of Mike Fiduk, Jesse Allen, and Señor Roberto Caruso, we drove all my stuff a mile and a half and deftly moved everything inside. Moving is a painful process, but with the help of my friends it was quick and efficient. With an unexpected assist from Richie, the 82 year old gentleman who lives on the ground floor of my building, we were finished by about 1 o’clock. I bought the fellows some beers and sandwiches and went to deliver the truck on Dekalb Avenue. I left Jesse and Mike to deal with Time Warner when they showed up—Robbie had to run off to work. When I returned from delivering the truck, the Time Warner guy was drilling a hole in the wall to run the cable to the place I had specified to Jesse. Bam bam bam. Knocking things out. I was pleased.

My place is still jam packed with boxes and cardboard and crap. I have three pieces of furniture I need to assemble. I need to sweep and mop. I need to get my receiver fixed and then hang my surround speakers. But I have the interwebs, which is easily the most important thing. More important than running water. More important than sunlight. More important that gravity.

Luckily all those are still in place so the internet works nicely.

The only weirdness about the new place is that I don’t have a sink in the bathroom. Kind of sucks, but since I’m the only person in the place and I’ve hung curtains, I can wander around all sorts of buck ass naked and never worry that the people on Greenpoint Avenue are going to see me in my birthday suit.

Funny story, the morning after I moved in, I was getting out of the shower and wandered over toward the bedroom to put on some clothes when I saw my friend Charles, of Year of Record fame, peeking into the window from across the street. Being on only the second floor you can pretty much see right in to my place. I recognized Charles and waved at him and his friend and they came into my apartment. They both agreed that it’s super duper awesome, which it totally is. But that was also the point where I recognized I needed curtains as soon as possible.

Look out for photos in a couple days once I have everything set up and tidy. Until then, enjoy a video of my parents’ dog blowing off my little brother.

Stupid dog.

> Continue reading...Thoughts on the move.

A Letter to My Tonsils Regarding Their Current Inability to Function For Longer than a Week Without Providing Me Serious Distress.

March 31, 2010 |

Letters and Writing

Dear Tonsils,

It has been a long road for the three of us, hasn’t it? I recall clearly my entire childhood my mother noting that you two were very large, even then, and I always thought it curious. What a strange thing to have large tonsils. We had such a fine life together through most of my childhood.

I recall, quite clearly, the first time you caused me pain. I was 13 and at camp for the summer. I remember one day my throat hurting like nothing I’d ever experienced before. A burning, miserable pain every time I swallowed. Down at the showers I looked at the back on my throat in the small mirror screwed to the tree by the hand washing basin and saw, for the very first time, a sight that would become something I’d know as a horrible, horrible sign: white splotches covering you two. It hurt even to swallow my spit; water and food caused me grievous discomfort. But, as a 13 year old, being sick means admitting that you can’t tough your way through everything and that is admitting defeat. Instead of going to the infirmary right away, I suffered silently. At lunch at the doctor’s table, I couldn’t eat at all and just sat there, frustrated, angry, in pain, and broke into silent tears. Jim, the table councilor, took a look at me and then took me straight over to the infirmary where I stayed for the next few days as I slept off my fever and had the anti-biotics I so dearly needed administered. That was our first, but most certainly not our last, experience with those dastardly streptococcus bacteria. I’m sure you’re familiar with them, tonsils.

Time passed and I forgot about the special type of hell I lived through that week. During my junior year of high school I came down with infectious mononucleosis. I thought I was just bored, but as it turned out I had mono. The mono made me slightly more tired, a little draggy, but wasn’t too bad. What it really did that I enjoyed so much was open the door for our good friend strep to walk right back into the back of my mouth and set up shop. TWICE. That was an unpleasant year, salvaged only by 800mg hits of ibuprofen, raspberry sorbet, and liquid penicillin. Really, tonsils, no one should have to deal with this. It’s unpleasant.

And how many times during college did we come down with strep throat, tonsils? 3? 4? More? Too many times, tonsils. It was about this point that I started to suspect that you were broken. Swollen, disfigured, scarred, I don’t know anyone else who gets food stuck in their tonsils. That’s a bad sign right? I’m fairly certain it means that something is wrong. When the doctor referred to you as “hypertrophic,” meaning that you were huge, he probably didn’t mean it in a complimentary way. I think what he meant to say was, “Damn, son. Those shits in the back of your throat are right fucked up.”

Now here we are hours away from April and I have strep for the third time since the end of February. What is that? Five weeks? Consider me frustrated. The first of the three was pretty easy. You two got gross and whatever, but I was never in any serious pain. But the second time? Lord. I was up all night having fever delusions, unable to sleep for the pain you were causing me, choking down water and Advil by the thimbleful so I wouldn’t keel over dead. Not nice. Not nice at all. And since I’m a freelancer, I don’t get sick days. I was sitting at Number 6, sipping soup, and wincing as I tried to get it into my stomach. When those white splotches reappeared this Monday, I nearly had a heart attack. I’m moving on Saturday and have so much stuff to do tomorrow and Friday that I could not afford to be incapacitated with strep.

All this begs the question, what’s the next step for us, tonsils? If I have anything to do about it, you will soon be but a memory. The Ear/Nose/Throat specialist I went to see tonight took a look at you, recoiled, and said, “Oh my god, yes. Those are infected.” I said to him, “Doc, this is nothing. You should have seen the last round,” and he looked at me like he couldn’t imagine how it could be worse. It made me wish I had a photo. He then told me that the next step was surgery but that he didn’t want to operate until I’d been infection-free for a few weeks. Here’s what I think will happen: I’m going to run this third round of anti-biotics, I’ll be fine for a few days, and BOOM splotches. He tried to put the fear of the surgery into me telling me how painful it would be for a couple weeks. But I just countered that it would be better than living under the constant tyranny of two motherfucking, goddamned, asshole tonsils that kept making me ill.

Sorry, guys, I got a little carried away there.

Anyway, it’s been a long road and I wish I could say that I was sad to see you go. But I’m not. Good riddance. I just want you out by mid-May so I can get healed and go down to the Maryland Death Fest and have a jolly old time.

Sincerely,

Joe Dillingham
The Black Laser.

> Continue reading...A Letter to My Tonsils Regarding Their Current Inability to Function For Longer than a Week Without Providing Me Serious Distress.

My sister Christina on the eBay blog.

March 31, 2010 |

Thoughts

My sister from the same mother and father, Christina, has been kicking ass at her relatively new job at eBay doing, uh…whatever it is she does there. Marketing or something. I don’t know. Christina, what the hell do you do there?

Anyway, I’m super proud of her for kicking ass in her job and all in all being such a cool little sister. And here she is featured in a video from eBay’s blog. She’s the first face you see. Isn’t she like so adorable or some crap? Of course, the very first thing she does is to break the Second Commandment, but I forgive her.

Good job, Kissie!

> Continue reading...My sister Christina on the eBay blog.

Nature by Numbers.

March 30, 2010 |

About Filmmaking and Film & TV

In the past science considered nature random, disorganized, messy. They thought that only human created geometries were perfect, the square, the circle, and other various permutations of lines meeting lines. Then they discovered fractals and realized that nature is, in fact, largely based on math. It’s just that the math was more complicated than they were expecting. Go, nature.

This video is a beautifully animated piece that explores this connection between math and the natural world. Definitely worth a watch. Enjoy.

> Continue reading...Nature by Numbers.

Art is important for any home.

March 29, 2010 |

Thoughts

About a million years ago I went to the Guggenheim with my friends Chris and Ryan when they were in town for a little visit. We wandered into the permanent collection and saw what I consider to be the most beautiful painting ever created. This is it.

That’s right. It’s a painting of a lobster fighting a cat. By Pablo Picasso. Is it not the finest piece of artwork you’ve ever seen? The Guggenheim has a total bullshit write-up of the painting on their site, but I like to think that we’re seeing the result of kooky, old Picasso making something he thinks is funny for a friend. Like, “Hey dude, we’re friends, I made you this rad painting of a lobster fighting a cat. Sweet. See you later!”

I have a print of this painting hanging in my living room right now. It’s awesome.

I have some other art too. I have three small, original paintings by artist R. Nicholas Kuszyk of robots. Today I also purchased a print of a piece called “Zombies vs Unicorns” from Josh Cochran.

I’m pretty excited about this one. I definitely need to get it framed.

I also want to print out a bunch of photos nice and big and frame them and place them around the apartment. Unfortunately, Adorama is closed for Passover so I’ll have to wait a little bit. Not really a problem.

There has always been one piece of art I’ve never seemed to able to find as a decent sized print. It’s this.

Ok. Do me a favor and look at this painting. Do you see the surly clown sitting there having a drink, smoking a cigarette, and being ignored by the patrons? It’s totally awesome, right? I know. It’s a painting called “Soir Bleu” by Edward Hopper, who you might know by his iconic “Night Hawks”. The real painting lives at the Whitney here in New York and while I’d like to steal the original, I think I’ll make due with a print. The problem has always been that I’ve never been able to find a decent sized print of the work. I’ve seen posters, but those are lame. I’ve seen post cards, but those are tiny. But, I’ve never seen a good sized print.

Until today. While chit chatting with a friend on IM about artwork, I found that the Whitney will make me a 24×40 inch print for 85.00. Seriously? I’d be stupid not to do that. It’s absolutely worth the 85 bucks for something that big to put in my apartment. I think it would look magnificent hanging in my house opposite my Picasso. I’m not sure yet where the Unicorn and Zombie piece will go, but I’m sure I’ll find a home for it.

Are there any things you guys think I should add to my collection of decoration for my new place? Nothing make a home feel like a home as quickly as hanging things on the wall and having furniture. After a Saturday bonanza at Ikea, the latter is accounted for. Suggestions, friends?

> Continue reading...Art is important for any home.