Posts tagged “devolution”

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • DEVO – Focus Group Testing the Future [YouTube] – Filled with brilliantly sarcastic soundbites, this is definitely pushing on post-modernism/post-irony. DEVO doing focus group testing (or so they say) on every aspect of their 2010 offering (brand, logotype, instrumentation, clothing). Interesting also to see how this appears in the press with varying amounts of the irony removed.
  • Theater Preshow Announcements Take Aim at Cellphones [NYTimes.com] – In a production of “Our Town” the director, David Cromer, who played the Stage Manager, took a minimal approach because he wanted to stay true to Thornton Wilder’s desire to forgo conventional theatrics. “In that show we had this issue, which is that there was to be no theater technology. The whole act of my entrance was that you were supposed to think it was someone from the theater,” Mr. Cromer explained. “We didn’t want the Stage Manager to come out and say, ‘Please turn your cellphones off,’ because that would be rewriting Wilder.” Instead Mr. Cromer simply held up a cellphone upon entering at the beginning of each act and then turned it off and put it away, casually showing the audience what to do without talking about it. “The first time I was watching another actor take over in the show as the Stage Manager,” Mr. Cromer said, “he came out, held his cellphone in the air, and the woman next to me said, ‘Oh, someone lost their cellphone.’ ”

Are we not men? What a drag it isn’t getting old.

Looking through an airline magazine last week we found this:
devodetail.jpg

That’s a detail from this full-page ad:
devolarge.jpg

It seems the devolution that this art-project was always telling us about is indeed further along than when they started. It’s one thing to see an aging Steve Perry try to hit the high notes at a casino, but when you’ve got a band that dressed in silly costumes and ironically questioned their own human-ness, the nostalgia-revisionism takes on a whole other set of meanings. Their band picture evokes lameness at first, but then really just seems so perfect.

Tastiest of all is the name of the place where Devo is playing: Moron Go!

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