I recently wrote a story for The Daily Beast on whether Pop-Up books are being killed off by iPads and tablets and their wonderful assortment of beautiful, pop-up-like apps and ebooks. From Peter Rabbit to Alice in Wonderland to A Charlie Brown Christmas, more and more children’s classics are getting digitized but is that a good thing? Interviews with Harvard’s Maria Tatar, illustrator Robert Sabuda and app developers including Josh Koppel from ScrollMotion, and the teams behind the most successful kids apps out there.
Are pop-up books dying? We remember pulling our first paper tab and seeing a book miraculously come to life. But a lot of kids these days are getting that kick on iPads and other fancy tablets. Which makes one wonder if the steady stream of interactive ebooks aimed at kids means that this generation won’t have childhood memories of Pat the Bunny, Where’s Spot, or Peter Rabbit? …
Now, instead of kids ripping out paper tabs, they can happily bash the Queen of Hearts as her court gleefully wobbles under an iPad screen.
Jim Lee is one of rare comic book legends who, it turns out, is also a spectacularly nice guy in person. Lee has been making comic books for decades and is now the Co-Publisher of DC Comics and the main who pretty much redesigned DC’s entire line of superheroes including new looks for Superman, Batman and the rest of the Justice League of America.
I had a chance to talk to Lee just before the launch of the New 52, DC’s attempt to reinvent and streamline 52 of its most popular characters. That story ended up on GQ.com but there was a pile of great conversation with Lee that never made it in. Here are some of Lee’s thoughts on print pirates, the comic book industry, and showing up in the newspapers.
Interview with Jim Lee
“I don’t think any other genre can really blow your mind as much as comics. Comics are only limited by one’s imagination and the technology has risen to the point where they can translate a lot of that vision into film.”
On finding a new, mainstream audience…
“For decades, people in comics have explained what the industry is doing to expand the industry, right? “Where’re the female readers? Where are the kids? Where is the next generation of readers going to come from?” As the newsstand business dried up, I think one of the dangers that comics faced was to produce comic lines and comics that catered to a very select kind of, core collectors marketplace…”
On the decision to go day-and-date with digital comic books…
“I think [it's for] all those people that don’t live near comic book shops, ex-patriots, that live in other countries, definitely people that don’t even know that comics are being published. People that are early adopters that are converting to a digital lifestyle. I mean we’re not doing digital distribution to convert our traditional print reader into digital readers, but to the extent that there are people out there that want digital content, this is their opportunity to collect it legally.”
On piracy…
“I think you could make an argument that some of the slow erosion you’ve seen over the years in our print business has got to be a result of people switching over to pirating digital copies.”
“Someone gave me a harddrive full of comic book content and it’s so easy to copy comic books… It was interesting to see the variance in scan resolution, the fact is that [pirated] comic books aren’t authored, so if you’re trying to read it on your iPhone, good luck. You’re going to be doing a lot of crimping back and forth.”
On why comic books are still a collector’s market…
“There’s a difference between like, let’s say for example, newspapers and comic books. Comic books are still collectable. A lot of people, it’s almost like a how people use music to define themselves. If you’re a nerd or comic book collector, what you collect kind of defines you and it’s hard to show someone that by pulling out your iPhone and saying, “Come on, browse through.” You know? So i think it’s important. But also, it’s interesting, what you see in comics which you probably wont see in newspaper magazines is a lot of people will get a free webcomic but then go out and get the trade [edition] if they really like it. They want that physical copy for their collection whether they put it on their coffee table or its just something they need to have because that’s what you get out of ownership. It’s definitely there, it’s a viable business model and you’re not going to see that, you’re not going to read People magazine digitally and go, “I love this issue!, I gotta find a newstand copy! Oh wait, this one’s crumpled in the corner, screw it I gotta find… Who’s got a mint copy of people december, 2011?”
On illustrating for the iPad…
“You sort of lose the art of arranging panels on a page to form an eye pleasing composition but there’s also something that’s emparted subconsciously when you look at an entire page at first glance. There are things you pck up. You’re reading this panel but you still see things here [he gestures to a comic book page he's holding up] and it seeps into your subconscious as you’re reading. There’s also a very subtle thing that happens as you read a comic. As you start getting towards the end, you know you’re running out of pages and so subsconciously you’re readying yourself for some sort of climactic ending or reveal and you’d not have that in a digital medium.”
On the popularity of modern comic books…
“I would have been happy to have a profile of me in the local neighbourhood weekly right next to the yogurt shop. You know: “Yogurt shop opens,” and “Jim Lee, Comic Book Artist. Bif! Pam! Wow!” kind of thing. And yet here it, it’s covered in Entertainment Weekly and the New York Times.”
DC Comics recently launched the New 52, a vast reimagining of its main superheroes. I’ve been tagging along for all the excitement and writing up stories along the way (including this for Mashable, on their digital stuff).
All of those interviews also resulted in a ton of awesome but unused quotes from some big names in the comic book industry (Jim Lee, Geoff Johns, Joe Quesada, etc.).
Stay tuned for some top picks from those interviews in the (very) near future.
Spotify has landed stateside and anyone lucky enough to get a super-secret invite has access to, more or less, every song ever released ever. The freemium (ugh) model opens up a huge swathe of previously undiscovered music. This is exactly what happened to music savante, aural expert, audio addict and friend John Samuel Abbott IV.
Abbott dove into Spotify in search of rare tracks, old albums and previously untouched classics. He heard things he’d never heard before and came up with some choice Spotify Music Lessons. To wit:
Spotify Music Lessons (To Date)
The Talking Heads already did pretty much anything that has ever been done by anybody, and better. I wish David Byrne was my uncle.
David Bowie’s 90s albums are pretty solid and don’t get enough props – “Outside” in particular is awesome.
I’ve already devoured Hot Chip – sorry [redacted] but they are just not macho enough for me. Replace the voice with James Murphy or something and you got yourself a good band.
The Top 7 or 8 Alice In Chains songs might be better than the Top 7 or 8 Nirvana songs.
The Extended Club mix of “Like A Pen” is the greatest techno song ever made. I’m having some synesthesia action going on.
Most of Slayer’s music isn’t really all that good, unfortunately. They have a couple of world-burners (“Raining Blood”, “Angel of Death”, “Seasons In The Abyss”, “Disciple”) and spent the rest of their career trying to recapture those moments.
Lady Gaga is terrible.
The new Foo Fighters album is really super forgettable.
The new Incubus album would be great if Brandon Boyd cooled it with the lyrics.
Barry White ended up on the top of my “Most Listened” artists somehow.
2 Live Crew is EVEN BETTER THAN I REALIZED – [LYRICS REDACTED]
“But Not For Me” by Billie Holiday swings like a motherfucker.
Abbott later added: “Use your brocial media contacts to get the Spotify guys to get late Amon Amarth on there too, or risk the wrath of Odin.”
Toro Y Moi recently put out a new album and Filter Magazine was kind enough to let me review it for them. I was pretty positive about the album, Underneath the Pine. Which is good news. The bad news is that I only had about 200 words to chat you up about all that goodness.
Well, below, you can find my track-by-track listening notes and thoughts. Toro Y Moi (a product of South Carolina native and multi-instrumentalist Chaz Bundick) has been on the verge of blowing up for a while now, heck, even Odd Future like him, so you better get on board.
Whether you’re familiar or not, feel free to play along by listening to a free stream of the album HERE and scanning through the notes below. Would love to hear your thoughts.
1. Intro/Chi Chi – floating, sweeping riffs with a touch of sadness. decidedly more r&b/funk to the album. Taking a layered, almost live approach to the chillwave movement.
2. New Beat – sounds like a Jackson b-side with a slippery key line and walking/bouncing bass line. Chaz is not the most brilliant vocalist on the planet but the music isn’t about corralling the music but letting the textures overlap and intermingle. Just enough wistfulness to be endearing but not too much to be trite. Nice awareness of pacing and beat, steadying out rhythms and riffs or flattening his swirling effects to give his songs a sense of propulsion. (Cues from low shoulder)
3. Go With You – glo-wave can feel ice an amalgam of unmatched beats and effects. One of Chaz’ strengths is his deftness at matching complimentary rhythms across instruments. Almost orchestral in its overlapping of competing time signatures and open sounds. Some glo-wavers [chillwavers] are commendable for their ability to distort and expand their sound, Chaz’s skill comes from understanding how his distinct sounds interplay, and when to cut back to allow some space into his music.
4. Divina – ability to match pace and overlapped beats help lift even his instrumentals to more than an interlude but interesting fabrics in and of themselves.
5. Before I’m Done – Information Missing.
6. Got Blinded – psychedelia in the traditional sense, like a funk sergeant peppers. More straightforward, vocals take more of the stage with a nice bass kick drum beat behind what are probably an array of keyboards cutting and slamming at different tempos. Standout track, though chaz has a slight whine on his high end.
7. How I Know – a little too retro. Uninteresting as a straight homage/allusion. All tracks have a vague air of a psychedelic cartoon opener. Optimistic splash of sonic color and a vague threat of danger or sadness. With the amount of slamming rhythms, it can start to sound like a jackhammer insisting you bop along.
8. Light Black – ability to build tension and drop into different chord structures to both relieve and elevate the song to another texture
9. Still Sound – as above, knows when to cut and drop into a groove to break the pace and elevate the song to another tone, mood, or emotion. It’s hard to switch a song mid-stream without sounding rushed our amateur, Chaz is able to paint with his instruments and his reverbed, strangely ethereal voice. It’s as malleable as the rest of the electronics in his impressive repertoire and just as expressive. The sound of a human playing.
10. Good Hold – old style ballad through a circus mirror. Filtered into oblivion.
11. Elise – Built on drones. holds the song together as the rest of the instruments play overtop of it. It’s a safe anchor, and along with the largely unfiltered vocals, it gives the listener something to sink their ears into. It allows Chaz his flights of experimentation without losing touch of the song’s integrity at large
Here’s a little video for “Still Sound” with Chaz getting chased by a ghost – so there’s that:
The Black Eyed Peas don’t release “songs” the way that mainstream audiences are used to hearing them. What have they borrowed from live DJ sets?
The Black Eyed Peas are an increasingly big deal for increasingly confusing reasons. The secret to the Peas’ success owes more to DJ culture than auto-tune. It seems like the group peddles in the same electro-junk that pretenders to the throne (cough, 3Oh!3, Kesha. Sigh, “Ke$ha”) have tried to co-opt. To be sure, the Peas didn’t invent the over-produced, auto-tune song. They were, however, one of the first major acts to make the form their M.O.
Indie-kids will loudly cry that Radiohead’s Kid A was the first. Angsty indie-kids will say that Nine Inch Nails beat the whole scene years before the Peas were even a group. Props where they’re due, but the wining formula wasn’t just the ability to tear up, bit crush, or industrialize a sound otherwise Rammstein would have been world-famous. The Peas have taken the ball from T-Pain and fuzed the hip-hop success of auto-tune and heavy beats with the (refreshingly) old school melodies and tones from their own early records.
The E.N.D. marked the re-birth of the Peas into the genre, and arguably the birth of the genre along with it. But as much as autotune seems to dominate that record and their latest, The Beginning (get it? They did it in the wrong order!), their success owes more to DJ’s than T-Pain.
So how did the Peas go from “My Humps” to “Boom Boom Pow”? The Peas went from their vaguely-kitshcy, parody songs to embracing “that 3,000 and 8″ sound. The Peas don’t release “songs” the way that mainstream audiences are used to songs. Namely, the standard intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-outro format that populates most modern songs across all genres. Much of the songs on The E.N.D. and The Beginning are collections of several songs mixed together the way a DJ would spin a set, beat matching and mixing tempos.
The Peas are basically recording a straight album, remixing it in the studio, and then actually releasing that remixed version instead of the more traditional original. It should be said, I haven’t been to the recording sessions, but a quick listen to hits like “Boom Boom Pow,” “Imma Be Rocking That Body,” and the latest, “The Time (Dirty Bit),” reveal the different cuts, beats, and movements contained in each track. Heck, there are about five individual songs within “Imma Be” alone.
This is different from simply sampling songs, which bands and hip-hop acts have been doing for a long time. For example, check the 2-minute mark of “Boom Boom Pow” to see how the actual song starts to shift while keeping the base beat. How the drums cut to let the filtered/octave-shifted voice drop into a now much-heavier groove. Or listen to ”The TIme (Dirty Bit),” and how it deals with its sample (“Time Of My Life”). Rather than weave the sample through the song, informing the chord structures, the sample follows a DJ’s mentality: recognizable, familiar sample – delayed drum/synth build up at (0:50) – cut sound and a vocal cue (0:59) just before the beat drops into a ripping bass-line seemingly foreign from its source material.
This is not how bands usually treat samples. It is, however, a secret to the Peas’ success. Their hits are accessible to listeners that want to dance because the songs sound club-ready and mainstream at the same time (hey there, David Guetta). The songs are also palatable to DJ’s looking for an easy track to throw on. With the amount of samples and effects applied to the songs, it can make any mediocre DJ look like they’re doing way more with a Peas’ song simply by playing it straight. It’s also a guaranteed head-bopper and fan favorite thanks to the ton of radio play their songs receive.
Whether you actually like these songs, the samples, their treatment, etc. is almost irrelevant to how the Peas are treating their records and hits. The group is cutting edge for a reason that most would consider tangential. Their “future” sounds and post-post-modern (bleh) approach to cutting their own vocals is less interesting than their ability to make mainstream a DJ-mentality to music.
It’s worth skipping the first 20 minutes of TheSocialNetwork (re: that Facebook movie), it’s also worth staying for the entire rest of what is, largely, a spry and entertaining business room/courtroom drama.
The movie is very loosely based on the start and rise of Facebook through the lens of its (co)founder Mark Zuckerburg. Aside from an opening montage of Mark at Harvard (which is sometimes accurate and sometimes grossly false), most of the story is carried out in two pre-trials and Mark’s dealings with Sean Parker. Thank goodness for that.
Harvard is not Harvard, nor is it “fantasy Harvard” as some critics have called it. The misrepresentation is just silly. Two girls at a secret society, the Phoenix here played by the Spee, undress at a party and dance on a table while others carouse. Nope, and so on.
The rest of the film is a compelling case of friendships, ambition, and business politics with more than a sprinkle of genuinely witty humor. Jesse Eisenberg (as Mark) somehow manages to play off genius, malice, insecurity, and honesty all in one performance, helped by nice turns from best friend Saverin (played by a nuanced, expert Andrew Garfield pretending to be Hayden Christensen) and archetypal creep Sean Parker (an also-fantastic Justin Timberlake).
Is it real? Probably not, but the opening 20 minutes of absurdity-cum-college make that clear. It actually helps establish the non-fiction as fiction conclusion to resonate more as a parable than a legitimate retelling. The movie ends with a nice, ironically honest moment despite its saccharine, I-did-it-all-for-love implications. Still, The Social Network is worth a watch as a digital coming-of-age story for our online era.
Step Up 3D is awesome. Whew, I said it. More on that in a minute.
After many hours spent watching, writing and transcribing, this post caps off a heap of stories on all things dance/The LXD. After a story on Hulu’s new dance show for Mashable, and interviews with choreographers Harry Shum Jr. and Chris Scott, here is a quick take on the film with some amazing quotes from director Jon M. Chu below.
Step Up 3D is a ton of fun, riffing just enough on the “dance genre” to deliver something a little bit new. To be fair, calling this latest iteration a “film” is a bit of a stretch. There is a handsome lead who is moody but kind-hearted and a quirky cast of well-meaning street urchins and… You get it.
Realistically, you’re not seeing this movie for the plot or the character development (Adam Sevani is — of course — a stand-out). Dance-wise, the film delivers in unexpected ways. The huge set-pieces, a series of super-important dance battles, are epic but feel sucked of life: for the most part they feel over-produced and over-tricked. The more natural moments are the film’s strength. A brief capoeira training session, and the pre-requisite dance montage are all phenomenal. Actually. These loose moments allow the dancers to improv and joy in their own movement. The movie is appropriately best when the actors dancers just dance and forget about the film. Keep an eye on Twitch, Sharni Vinson and Daniel Campos.
The use of 3D still has a lot of potential and aside from some bizarre moments (things flying at the camera!) the dance does actually benefit for having it. Chu and crew prevail against a stifling film structure to deliver something special, unexpectedly and thankfully so.
LXD Interview: Jon M. Chu
Q:How is technology playing into dance?
Chu: Its cool to have friends in both worlds because the two are so interiwtned now and they’re only getting closer and closer. The promise of technology has always been, like, an emotional human connection. This is going to change the way humans interact. Final we’ve gotten past the technology to the point where now it is emotional… It’s happening in the arts as well.
There was a whole culture happening online because of YouTube, becaue of all the other sites, that the conversation of dance was happening globally. [The LXD] just kind of combined all my worlds and I was like, “Oh my gosh, I kind of get this. I kind of get where it should be going and whether it gets there or not, I have no idea but I think there’s an opportunity to play with it and I think it’s fascinating.”
Q: How does that mentality play into your dancers?
Chu: The reason I think our breakers are really good is because they have already mastered the technical part of their dance… it’s very technical stuff but it’s not emotional. When you get passed that then it becomes the art.
It’s once they don’t have to think about the head spin is when it becomes a part of their expression.
Q:I heard filming The LXD was a little run-and-gun, what was it like?
Chu: [For some episodes] they would stream [rehearsal] on Ustream on their iPhone and I would be on set [of Step Up 3D] and I could watch it and we didn’t need a company to come in and do that for us, it was all accessible. I was, like, a location scout with them ’cause I’d say like, “Oh, turn to the left” because I was going to be shooting when I got back, the first day I got back, so they’d show me and then I’d be able to to come in and just [film] it.
Q:Why are the episodes so short?
Chu: Our whole idea was to make edible pieces; things that you could watch and, whether you wanted to follow the story or just wanted to see the dance, you would give it to your friend to watch… We don’t know where its going to end up, we don’t know what our medium will be. But we’re going to throw some rocks in the pool and see.
On the spirit and energy of his films and film-making:
Chu: I don’t make movies to sit in a dark room and say, “Oh my gosh, this is brilliant” and then walk away from it. I make it because I like to see people’s reactions, whether it’s good or bad. I mean, Step Up 2 has like a 23[%] on Rotten Tomatoes, but I still love that movie.
Q:How do you see The LXD and the growth of your crew?
Chu: For me, watching our dancers dance together like at So You Think You Can Dance or at the Oscars is a very different experience for me than for probably any other viewer out there because I know every single one of them intimately.
I know how we started, I know us like fighting for, to get shoes or costumes for a show. So for me, it’s really emotional to watch that…
And I want to try and create that emotional connection with the audience and the only way I felt like, if the audience only knew each of those guys and their personalities they would enjoy this 20 times more. So that was the concept of, even the first season, like, “I want you to meet every single person you see.”
Q:What’s been the impact of the show on you?
Chu: I think it’s opening up opportunities for the dancers themselves ’cause they’re usually not the people who are in Britney spears videos or anything because they’re so unique. Usually [casting directors] want the same kind of dancers doing the same choreography; these guys are all freestyler dancers. Granted we have some really great choreography dancers too but for the most part we wanted to find the freaks and show them off and say, “This is art. This is poetry.”
When a guy can dance just with his fingers it’s something beautiful… and when you hear the story about why he does, it’s awesome.
While writing a story about Hulu’s new dance show, The LXD, for Mashable, I spoke with two lead choreographers, Harry Shum Jr. and Chris Scott. Over the course of an hour we spoke about how the show was using the online space, some of the troubles filming for the small screen and what they hoped to achieve with the show.
Of all the things we talked about, only a small portion of it actually made it into the story. I’ve gone back through the transcripts to dig out some choice quotes from that interview for anyone looking to get more insight into the show or the minds of the choreographers.
Note: Stay tuned for an interview with LXD and Step Up director Jon M. Chu.
Q:How is shooting these episodes on such a tight schedule? Is guerilla video-making intrinsic to any web series or is there a way to slow down the process?
Harry: I think we’d like to have both. There are certain [episodes] we look at and we’re like, “Ok, we’re going to need a little more time.”
We always tell our producers, “Please, give us one more day on this episode,” because usually we shoot an episode in one day (sometimes not even a full day). But also at the same time I think that’s also when you get some awesome things, like, the last episode that Jon (M. Chu) did, the finale, we literally shot probably about… a whole day of filming would usually take about two hours to do.
But with the talent we have, they don’t get frustrated, they’re like, “Ok, this is what we gotta do,” and they’re able to put the show on. And when you look at the footage it’s like, “Wow, this turned out really good.”
I mean, there’s a good side of it aside from having a heart attack at the end of the day.
Chris: Whenever we’re done, we finish a round of shooting and we look back and like, I can’t believe we just did that and we always just have that.
Harry: Every time.
Chris: If we can do it like this, we can do it on anything. We can make anything work.
Speaking about their personal motivation:
Chris: We really want to show how beautiful street dancing is because I kind of feel like sometimes it’s overlooked as a “beautiful” dance whereas contemporary is so beautiful and street dancing is just cool. It’s like a “cool” dance.
Q:How do you find talent, what’s it like working with the team, and what’s been the casting process for the show?
Chris: There’s kind of two ways that it works, either we write the character for a specific talent or we get a script and we go and find these pople who, most of the time, we know.
Harry: We’ve never really held an audition and what’s great is you know a guy’s name, you hear about him, people talk about him, you go online and then you’re able to see all his stuff and you go, “Oh yeah, we like him,” or “We’re iffy about him,” or “This one doesn’t work for this character,” but what’s great is you just hop on a computer and look at these guys talent and see if it works and I think that’s what’s great about the digital age. People can put their stuff up and you never know who’s looking at your stuff and that’s how we found a lot of these guys
Chris: Some of these guys have very specific looks so [auditioning for mainstream shows] is tough for them. We have a platform where that doesn’t matter. It’s about their abilities. Any looks, any age.
You could be 50 years old and you’re not going to book the next Usher tour, but you can come and be a part of what we do because there are no limits to what we do.
Chris: One of the coolest moments for me is when an older gentleman, who’s not really are demographic, he just stops me and I was wearing an LXD t-shirt and he stopped me and he was like, “Hey, I just randomly saw this on Hulu. It’s amazing what you guys are doing, I never seen you dance like that.”
And you know it’s so cool because he’s not a dancer, he’s never really been into dance, he’s a business man and this is just something that he just stumbled upon because it was on Hulu and it was free.
“I don’t think any other genre can really blow your mind as much as comics. Comics are only limited by one’s imagination and the technology has risen to the point where they can translate a lot of that vision into film.”
A simple hashtag between friends has turned into a bit of a thing. Check out my other, 
