Post-punk pioneers Devo say they are suing McDonald’s in the US over a Happy Meal doll that sports the band’s signature red flower pot hat.
In April the fast food chain released a series of American Idol Happy Meal toys in the US based on a range of music genres, including Disco Dave, Country Clay, Rockin’ Riley and Soulful Selma.
Devo’s complaint relates to New Wave Nigel, a toy kitted out in an orange jumpsuit, pink shades, and Devo’s “energy dome” hat.
The band also allege that the toy plays a “Devo-esque song”.
Das Intarwebs rumbled this morning with rumors that Activision and Viacom, current custodians of the Boston-born Guitar Hero franchise (from Cambridge’s Harmonix in partnership with CA’s Red Octane) and Rock Band (a Harmonix production) are in talks with none other than the Beatles.
Let me repeat that. The Beatles, the band that would not even enter the digital world deep enough to be on iTunes, are now considering their first digital music entry in the form of a video game.
Sorry for the lack of updates today. Work and the peursuit (edit: wow, bad typo) of financing for a new web project I’m working on took me to New York for the day. I did see some fantastic things while darting between offices - most notably, this amazing billboard found in NoHo:
Go team Venture! The Venture Brothers is my Lost. Season 3 has been amazing so far.
Once I got back (a scant couple hours ago) I had the chance to begin catching up on my RSS feeds, but only got as far as this Brookline article from the Wicked Local collective.
Watch out! The Brookline Health Department has issued a Bat Advisory, warning resident[s] to watch out for the winged creatures and to contact health officials if you spot one in your home — even if it hasn’t touched you.
When I go on my gonzo journalism binge to find the meaning of America this summer, I’ll be sure to keep a flyswatter handy as I drive up Beacon Street.
Ars Technica hit me with a quality one-two punch in reviews today, first with their take on the latest release of Songbird, and second with a Digg-smashing preview of Spore (specifically, the Creature Creator).
I spent a good chunk of the day yesterday down by the beautiful nook of Boston where the Back Bay, Fenway, and Huntington line all touch: off of the Hynes stop, down Boylston towards Hemenway Street. It was a lovely day, but something was bugging me as I walked about:
When I lived in this part of the city, from 2003-2005, there were five music instrument shops in the neighborhood. Now, there’s only one. Where shall the next wave of Northeastern and Berklee kids go to get their guitars and drums and such?
This isn’t to say that there aren’t good stores in the greater Boston area, but this corner was a haven for them for decades. It’s sad to see them all go so quickly.
So, here they are. Preserved online for posterity.
In case you haven’t seen this yet, one of the only DJs that’ll get me to dive into the “Club/Dance” section of Newbury Comics, Congress-recognizedGirl Talk, has announced that his next release shall go the way of Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails. Paste is reporting his next master work, Feed the Animals, will be released first online where fans can decide how much the pay for it. We should expect to see it in the next couple weeks, with a tangible record following about month or so later.
Major acts have seen success with this, no doubt. Many love to credit that to large quantities of major fans, but that misses a larger point. It should be known that small-size professional acts do quite well with a variant of this model. Look no further than MagnaTune, a website featuring independent artists offering DRM-free MP3s of albums, for which you can pay between $5 and $18 to download in a variety of file formats (including lossless WAVs). To put it in Boston terms, these are TT’s and Great Scott-caliber bands making good money through the system. Despite a $5 minimum, the average payment is right below $9, according to a USA Today interview.
So, the Boston Garden and Great Woods-sized bands do well. The TT’s and Great Scott sized bands seem to do well too. Girl Talk is going to enlighten the world as to how a Paradise or Middle East Downstairs sized band (or for those not fluent in Boston venuespeak, upper-mid-level professional musicians) fare with the model. It’s certainly exciting.
While waxing poetic about the glory days of the internet with Friend Webster the other night, we mentioned that strange phenomena of websites that were designed to look like actual spaces. Webster seems to recall it was programmed with VHTML, though pokes around Google and Wikipedia can’t seem to confirm that.
When I said the sites looked like real spaces, I should correct that. They looked like rejected Doom levels, and clicked through like Myst. Here’s a strange example I was able to pull out of somewhere. This was listed amongst a litany of other missed things from the frontier days of the World Wide Web (this was preceded by webrings, to clue into where our mind was at with this discussion).
Well, it’s not a rejected Doom level, but t-shirt company Atomic Tarantula seems to get the virtual-imitating-reality idea. Found via BoingBoing today, they specialize in sci-fi themed tee shirts done with a great degree of class. The website, rather than putting the shirts in sterile static pages, prefers to sprawl out all the shirts as one might on their bedroom floor as if you were, say, a sci-fi nut.
I picked up the shirt of Frank or Dave in a corridor of Discovery One from 2001. Pretty swank, both in content and execution. Check it out.
Dedicated stalkers will know I am part of a neat little project with band/roommates Oscar, Stacey, and Jackie: Endless Feature - where we made a stack of every DVD we own and have not seen (regardless if the others have seen it), and all summer long we watch each one and liveblog the experience. A few weeks back we had the chance to see King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, a documentary on two men and their quest to be the best Donkey Kong players in the world. We promptly fell in love with this cast of characters and their truly incredible story, and the movie is currently in our top favorites of the summer, along with Bandé A Part, High School Confidential, and (for all the wrong reasons) The Ice Pirates. Here’s the trailer:
The movie tells the story of 20-year reigning DK champion Bill Mitchell, a scratch-to-the-top, take no prisoners character, and Steve Wiebe, a good guy down on his luck and needing some serious validation. The movie’s thrilling conclusion takes place at the Classic Video Game and Pinball Tournament, which is held annually at Funspot in Weirs Beach, NH. The event is hosted by video game scorekeepers Twin Galaxies, a group so professional at fact-checking and ethics that the Guinness Book of World Records crew consider them the official source on world record high scores. I can do little justice in describing the experience - you really have to see this movie to believe it.
As luck would have it Oscar and I were driving home from a wedding yesterday morning in North Conway, NH. Our route home had us passing right through Weirs Beach, on what happened to be the last day of the same annual tournament. Naturally, we stopped in to check it out, and here’s what we found:
courtesy kottke.org and Flickr user Pixelsurgeon. Reminds me a great deal of the WTFCNN blog and other sites dedicated to reporting on the total tedium of daytime cable.
(Edit: Damn! BoingBoing bests my post by three minutes! Nice to think I’m on the same wavelength as Cory Doctorow, though.)
Equally at home hanging out with the Beatles or Monty Python (at a show I was at a few years back lead singer Neil Innes described what it was like recording at Abbey Road while the Liverpool four were recording Revolver next door), the Bonzos hold a unique place in the history, and have always been progressive in a lot of fronts. Neil’s website is loaded with chords and MP3 downloads, embracing the idea of open access for music fans. The brilliant collaboration of the Pythons and Bonzos brought us the landmark mockumentary movie: The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash, which is up there with Spinal Tap as the best faux rockumentary of all time. I posted a few weeks ago about They Might Be Giants being the best rock band of all time - it’s hard to imagine how they could have walked the rock/novelty line without the trailblazing efforts of the Bonzos.
Now, whether or not they will be remembered for any of these things remains to be seen, but their legacy might last longer than thought thanks to one particular song they wrote. Frequent viewers of Magical Mystery Tour or owners of Gorilla by the Bonzos probably already know what I’m driving at here, but here it is:
That’s right. Death Cab for Cutie. The song that titled the band. The more you know.
Here’s a lovely picture that will lead to the link that will lead to the interview we did with the boys from Bellingham:
