Posts tagged “rock”

ChittahChattah Quickies

Mermaids poised for their mainstream splash [SF Chronicle] – Here’s an emergent trend that we’ll all want to get in front of, whether it’s cultural literacy or presents for friends and children, or perhaps cashing in before it the bubble bursts.

Mermaids are about to swamp vampires and zombies as supernatural rainmakers in popular culture. Photographer Mark Anderson is releasing a book called “M: Mermaids of Hollywood,” that features Anna Faris, the Kardashians, Kristen Bell and others in tails. Carolyn Turgeon, author of “Mermaid: A Twist on the Classic Tale,” has agreed to run a new magazine, Mermaids & Mythology. The true beneficiaries of the mermaid bull market are small-business owners who cornered the mermaid market before there actually was one. Eric Ducharme, who lives near Tampa, makes about seven latex tails a month for $500 to $700 and since December has created 25 silicone ones for $1,600 to $5,000, including one for Lady Gaga. The Weeki Wachee Springs Underwater Theater, also near Tampa, started its mermaid shows in 1947. In danger of closing just a few years ago, it’s now hosting sold-out camps for adults who want to swim with tails.

Masked Protesters Aid Time Warner’s Bottom Line [NYTimes.com] – The mask wearers have been seen here in the Bay Area recently, in protests against the BART transit system preemptively disconnecting cell service in advance of a protest. There’s clearly a market for knockoff masks, which may lead to some corrective corporate actions, which may in turn lead to more protests and indeed an entire economic turnaround.

When members [of Anonymous] appear in public to protest censorship and what they view as corruption, they don a plastic mask of Guy Fawkes, the 17th-century Englishman who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Stark white, with blushed pink cheeks, a wide grin and a thin black mustache and goatee, the mask resonates with the hackers because it was worn by a rogue anarchist challenging an authoritarian government in “V for Vendetta,” the movie produced in 2006 by Warner Brothers. What few people seem to know, though, is that Time Warner, one of the largest media companies in the world and parent of Warner Brothers, owns the rights to the image and is paid a licensing fee with the sale of each mask.

Come On, Feel the Mud [NYTimes.com] – This interactive feature has some lovely, if muddy pictures, but mostly I was struck to learn that there’s a Polish Woodstock. If nothing else, we are clearly a decades past the dawn of political correctness where that phrase could only be the punchline to an offensive joke.

The original Woodstock festival was known for both its music and its mud. Although it is no relation to the American festivals, the Woodstock Festival in Kostrzyn nad Odra, Poland, does its best to recreate the experience by building giant mud pits in which thousands of young Poles writhe and wrestle to a hard-driving beat. Now in its 17th year, the Polish Woodstock mixes older Western rock bands like Prodigy and Helloween with popular Polish acts like Laki Lan and Enej. Despite the aggressive music, the vibe in the mud pit is much more summer of love. “We are moshing, we are throwing sand and dirt, but it’s really friendly,” said Michal Knapinski, 16. “When someone falls, there are hundreds of hands pulling him up.”

There goes my hero…

Exploitative sellout and marketing disappointment, or layer cake of irony?

I saw this Kurt Cobain-branded Converse All-Star recently on the bargain racks at Ross. I laughed, I cried.


Detail of another shoe in “The Kurt Cobain Collection,” from the Converse website

Seattlest had a pithy take on it:

Kurt Cobain shaped the country’s rock music landscape while wearing Converse sneaks. He blithely, angrily altered Seattle’s future, ripped a hole for the city on the map of pop culture, all while wearing Converse. He went nuts on stage. He whispered and screamed. He played the shit out of guitars. He shot up and nodded off in the shoes.

Kurt killed himself while wearing Converse. The shoes were prominent in the image that famously documented his death. Naturally, then, Converse will begin selling Kurt Cobain-“inspired” shoes this May. It is, apparently, the “Converse Century,” after all. What better way to celebrate?

The full piece here.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • Segmenting the Hendrix fan [NYTimes.com] – “We believe that there is a Jimi Hendrix fan out there at 99 cents and at $9 and at $20 — all the way across the spectrum,” Mr. Block said. “We want to make each fan an appropriate offering. Is the complete Jimi Hendrix on vinyl something every music fan would want? Absolutely not. Would there be a market for it? Absolutely.”
  • Jerry Seinfeld on ideas [NYTimes.com] – Whatever happens to “The Marriage Ref,” Mr. Seinfeld said that he was out of ideas now. “Ideas are a terrible obligation,” he said. “Who needs something else to take care of? I have kids. I’d rather nurture them than another idea.”
  • The Disposable Film Festival – In recent years a new kind of film has emerged: The Disposable Film. It has been made possible by new media (webcams, point and shoot digital cameras, cell phones, screen capture software, and one time use digital video cameras) and the rise of online distribution (YouTube, Google, MySpace, etc.). These films are often made quickly, casually, and sometimes even unintentionally. Everyone has become a Disposable Filmmaker: directors of Saturday night cell phone videos, actors under the eyes of security cameras, and narrators before their webcams. Let's face it – we live in an age of disposable film. Now it's time to do something creative with it.
  • How to Kill Innovation: Keep Asking Questions – Scott Anthony [Harvard Business Review] – Resource-rich companies have the "luxury" of researching and researching problems. That can be a huge benefit in known markets where precision matters. But it can be a huge deficit in unknown markets where precision is impossible and attempts to create it through analysis are quixotic. Entrepreneurs don't have the luxury of asking "What about…" questions, and in disruptive circumstances that works in their favor.

    So what's the alternative? Substitute early action for never-ending analysis. Figure out the quickest, cheapest way to do something market-facing to start the iterative process that so frequently typifies innovation. Be prepared to make quick decisions, but have the driver of the decision be in-market data, not conceptual analysis. In other words, go small and learn. Pitch (or even sell) your idea to colleagues. Open up a kiosk in a shopping mall for a week. Create a quick-and-dirty website describing your idea. Be prepared to make quick decisions.

ChittahChattah Quickies

Rock and roll is a vicious game

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“Is that for your kids?” asked the Sears dude as he handed me the box. “Uh, my kids?, heh heh, it’s for me!” I managed as I headed out of the online-order-pickup station. [Yeah, Sears.com actually has something in their store if their website says they do; unlike Circuit City that shows an item available when you look on their website but when you visit their store it’s not on the shelves and if you can find a human who’s willing to help you, all you’ll hear is that they don’t have it. You lost a customer, Circuit City!]

Just last week I saw leaked footage (since pulled down) of an upcoming video game called Rock Band where a group of people perform a song (using guitar controllers, a drum accessory, and a microphone) and it just gave me chills. I realized I needed to get Guitar Hero, the existing predecessor.

I grew up playing video games. As a kid, we’d find any bowling alley or arcade and spend hours pumping in quarters. I used to hang out a dry cleaners (!) after school, playing whatever game they had. I got an ATM card and moved my bank account just so I could go next door to get $5 at a time in this afterschool activity. So why was I not doing it still? I had a PSX for a while; it was amusing, but it never really fit.

But this – the idea of a game that was about performing…I’d been hearing about it for a long time; stumbling across the video and subsequent conversation with friends was the motivational tipping point for me.

Wow.

The game is fun. It’s really really fun. This is an innovation around the notion of what a video game can be. Musical and performing games have been appearing for many years, such as PaRappa the Rapper, and Dance Dance Revolution, or the various precursors of Guitar Hero that one could find in a Tokyo arcade 5 years ago.

The idea of the game isn’t new, but is definitely novel. You hold a guitar, with five different buttons where frets would be. Instead of strings, there is a strumming bar. On screen, notes come towards you on a fretboard. When the note gets to the bottom, press the corresponding button on the fretboard and strum, zapping the note. Each level is a different song and the notes that play (or don’t, if you miss) as you zap ’em make up the guitar parts of the song. You are essentially playing the song, with enough realism that you get a real charge out of it.

Some nice touches make it really work. There is a great tutorial that explains how to play and how to use the controller. No need to page through the tiny print in a book and figure out what the heck is going on; they’ve designed an explicit learning interface.

As well, there are various levels, to enable you to have some success. We played on Easy, and it was tough at first, then become somewhat less tough with practice. And more fun, the better we got. We dabbled with the Medium setting and it was more fun to play. This blew me away. Instead of simply increasing the challenge (more monsters, smarter monsters, faster moving monsters), the game gives back more. The more intricate the pattern of notes you are sent, the closer you are to “playing” the song. It’s more fun and more engaging.

There’s a nice mode where you can go through any of the songs at a variety of slower speeds and practice the guitar parts. The songs are broken down into intro/chorus 1/verse 1/bridge/solo etc. so you can really focus on what you are trying to learn.

This is the best game I’ve ever seen and it’s a really nice implementation of some fresh thinking about what video games can enable.

We were amused to see the game featured in the New York Times today (although they referred incorrect to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Texas Flood” as “Texas Blood.” Nice).
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Finally, the SF Chron featured this image, full-size, on their real estate supplement.
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Kids? Sheesh. This is the perfect game for my generation, young Sears dude.

The Face(s) of Rock and Roll

The SF Chron asks readers Do the Rolling Stones still have it? Aside from the content, here are some of the people whose responses they used:
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We saw the show last night and this is of course a valid representation of the demographic. It’s just still an emotional collision to be at a stadium concert and see people who resemble your parents in the seats behind you. The Stones are aging, and too much has been written about that, but we’re all aging as well. I’ve noticed a gentle version of this at Tragically Hip concerts, where the band and their fans have grown into early middle-age together, but it’s a more soothing transition. Here, with the Stones and their fans, we’re forced to confront the absolute opposites of the image of rock and roll and the reality of rock and roll.

At the same time, we’ve got this whole School of Rock thing going on, where kids who weren’t born when we were rocking out in high school are now recording or performing some of the same music. Is there any rebellion for a 15-year old in 2006 to be windmilling a la Townshend as his parents beam in approval? Were kids singing Pat Boone along with their parents 40 years ago, or is there a new form of co-option going on? This MeFi thread about kids covering Rush songs doesn’t quite get there (although some of the example YouTube links are fun) and I certainly can speculate but I don’t know the answer.

I think it was Dennis Miller, in his younger rebellious (and long-haired) days who joked that Pete Townshend was going to have to change the lyrics in the upcoming (the first of many, it turned out) reunion tour to “Hope I die before I get oldest.”

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

Looking through an airline magazine last week we found this:
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That’s a detail from this full-page ad:
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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!

Ridges that Rock?


Golden Grahams specifies in small type that they are a Ridged Cereal. Umm, okay.


And then later they claim that they come with Ridges that Rock!

Really? They are going to hang their hat on a lame-ass claim like that? Golden Grahams can be said to be many things (delicious, crunchy, sugar-tastic, part of this complete breakfast) but they absolutely can not in any sense be said to “rock.” The possession of ridges, or lack thereof, does not in anyway influence the “rock”ingness of cereal.

Golden Grahams do not rock. Their ridges do not rock.

This is patently a false claim.

So much for fact checking


So much for fact checking. A review from the SF Chron

CD REVIEWS: “In a time of austerity in the music business, ‘Weird Tales of the Ramones‘ is a behemoth, containing 85 songs on three CDs and every single video the band filmed from 1981 to their retirement in 1996. In this unsentimental but nonetheless fascinating document of rock endurance, fans visually and audibly experience the Ramones in their sullen glory, all deadpan pasty faces, ripped skin-tight jeans and off-the-rack leather jackets. They go from snarling through three-minute blasts of rage and irony on songs like ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue,’ ‘Cretin Hop’ and ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ to having most of their raw edges rubbed down as they become the benign cartoonish elder punk statesmen of their later years, wading through a myriad of age-related songs like ‘When I Was Young,’ Tom Waits’ far too revealing ‘I Don’t Wanna Grow Up’ and the painfully brilliant ‘I Want To Live,’ from Joey Ramone’s posthumously released solo album. This is a fascinating but hardly weird tale, unless you consider it weird how undervalued these pre-eminent architects of the American punk juggernaut were during their lifetime.

— Jaan Uhelszki.

But I Want To Live isn’t from Don’t Worry About Me (the above-referenced posthumous Joey album), it’s from 1987’s Halfway to Sanity (and it seems to be called I Wanna Live, in fact).

How hard would it be to get that right? I haven’t seen the new box set, but don’t you imagine it includes liner notes that indicate where the songs were from?

Lame.

Experience Music Project

While in Seattle we went to the Experience Music Project.
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It was $20 to enter, so we didn’t bother. What a weird building! We took a monorail over there, a 3 minute ride, at least you got to sort of enter the structure on the train in an interesting way, but then you get out to see this gross monstrosity, like some kind of huge scale model of your internal organs for learning purposes. There’s a midway and rides and the Space Needle, and this thing. And it’s $20. So we wandered around uncomfortably, trying to make sense out of things like “SkyChurch” and other weird labels for features of the museum that were just too hard to figure out but you knew they had musical relevance because they were “cool” names. We hit the gift shop which was one of the most depressing things ever. Jimi Hendrix water bottles! Jerry Garcia fuzzy stuffed toys. Gah! The whole thing just was so incredibly sold out, I mean, I guess rock and roll is totally over, I certainly felt it that day.

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