| To: LindyBill who wrote (6345) | 10/26/2011 5:14:38 AM | | From: Neeka | | | | | Block Buster has on demand streaming. And since NF made some many of their subscribers angry, they sure have been putting on one heck of an on line ad campaign. I haven't tried it yet, and haven't looked through their library, |
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| From: LindyBill | 10/26/2011 5:45:35 AM | | | | | | I didn't get cable until the 90's. My son's biggest thrill upon moving out in 89 was getting MTV.
When Video Killed Radio Stars By DWIGHT GARNER Published: October 24, 2011
Like almost everyone who was a teenager in the early 1980s, when the Music Television network first went live on cable, I wanted my MTV. I’d glue myself to the channel for hours, losing body mass, muscle control and self-esteem, the way my son gives himself over to video games today. MTV demanded that you linger in front of it for entire afternoons, because it tucked its few good videos amid so many horrible ones. You had to learn Zen couch potato patience.
Everett Collection Madonna in the video for "Material Girl," 1984.
I WANT MY MTV
The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution
By Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum
Illustrated. 608 pages. Dutton. $29.95.
Before MTV, scanning for new music on television was mostly a thankless task, even if you stayed up late, and stayed home, on weekends. There was “Saturday Night Live,” then as now hit or miss musically. There were the greasy, bell-bottomed bands on “Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert,” many past their prime. MTV delivered not just new music, constantly on tap, but also a jumpy new visual aesthetic. Directors began editing footage the way Edward Scissorhands trimmed hedges.
It’s been said that the music you listen to when you first begin steaming up car windows is the music you want to hear for the rest of your life. This explains why I and so many people I know still cock our heads wistfully at songs by — and especially acoustic cover versions of songs by — iffy bands like Men at Work, Tears for Fears and Thompson Twins. It’s a generational cross we bear, and we’ve come to terms with it.
All of this is a prelude to saying that I’m smack in the center of the target demographic for “I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution,” by the music journalists Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum. The book is an oral history, like Jean Stein and George Plimpton’s “Edie: An American Biography,” and a volume this one more closely resembles, Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s excellent “Live From New York,” about “Saturday Night Live.”
If “I Want My MTV” is not nearly as riveting as those earlier books, it largely has the network itself to blame. MTV and its ancillary channels (VH1 and MTV2 among them) have parsed this history so often in shows like “Behind the Music” and “Beavis and Butt-Head,” and in specials like “100 Greatest One Hit Wonders,” that we’re painfully familiar with much of the material here.
Yet I read this mild narcotic of a book, which covers the network’s glory years from 1981 to 1992, pretty happily. It reminded me of those long days watching MTV, back when it still played videos. Reading this, you prop up your eyelids with toothpicks and stick around for the good bits.
MTV went live on Aug. 1, 1981. Many cable companies wouldn’t carry it, partly because of its rock ’n’ roll content, and in the early days you could watch it in Wichita, Kan., for example, but not New York City.
The channel didn’t really crash into the national consciousness until 1983. Bands that got their videos played that year became famous almost overnight. Every sentient straight male in the country developed a schoolboy crush on Martha Quinn, one of the first V.J.’s, fresh out of New York University and so cute she could make your cranium detonate.
The authors encourage their subjects to dilate on MTV’s precursors, including the director Mike Nichols’s use of Simon and Garfunkel in “The Graduate,” and the “Born to Be Wild” chopper-riding scene in “Easy Rider.” They deliver a corporate history of MTV and marvel at its cagey business model, seemingly borrowed from Tom Sawyer and his white picket fence: It got record labels and artists to make the videos and give them to MTV.
When MTV started, there were so few music videos extant that the network scrambled for content. Many early videos came pouring out of Britain, from acts like Duran Duran, A Flock of Seagulls, ABC, Joe Jackson and the Police, in a parade the early MTV executive Bob Pittman refers to here as “the second British Invasion.”
Most of these European performers were decidedly un-macho, the antithesis of longhair American bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd and Grand Funk Railroad, and they had an electric impact on young audiences. John Taylor, the bass player for Duran Duran, is eloquent about these early videos.
“They were dropping like bombs on the suburbs of Ohio and Texas, places that were so conservative,” Taylor says. “For people that were a little different — maybe they didn’t yet know they were gay, or didn’t know they were into art — the kinds of things that were on MTV were like life changers. All this stuff like Culture Club was the result of an underground, progressive, liberal, London art school sensibility.” Cheap videos gave way to expensive ones. The channel made international stars out of Madonna and Michael Jackson, who was the first black artist given substantial airtime on MTV. Hair metal arrived, with its attendant cleavage, firebombs and sodden double entendres. The authors deadpan: “Videos created ample work for Playboy playmates and for choreographers, dancers, mimes, animal trainers, pyrotechnicians, hairdressers, aestheticians, dry-ice vendors, coke dealers and midgets. (Midgets were a staple of music videos. Midget freelance work surely peaked in the ’80s.)”
This book is packed with mea culpas from rockers who had dreadful haircuts or made career-defining dreadful videos during the 1980s. About one of her videos, Patty Smyth says, “I had no idea it would look like an Off Broadway version of ‘Cats.’ ” Billy Joel says he got this order: “Dance around with a wrench in your hand.” Billy Squier’s career was ruined by his pastel outfits and giddy prancing in the video for “Rock Me Tonite.” The authors call this “the worst video ever made.”
Details like these pile up in “I Want My MTV.” Here are a few stray quotations, chosen almost at random: “I slept inside of a chandelier last night. What’s your excuse?”; “the cow flew out the back of the trailer”; “We fed Valium to a few cats and had them running around a table while we had a feast with sexy models and Playboy centerfolds, ripping apart a turkey”; “At one point I was drinking gin out of a dog’s dish.”
In the late 1980s bands began to run out of new ideas. MTV’s ratings sagged. Rap music helped for a while, creating in America what one record executive calls “the white homeboy nation.” In 1992 MTV had a hit with “The Real World,” an unscripted soap opera, and before long videos were a thing of the past. Today the network’s biggest star is Snooki.
There’s a lot of hand-wringing here about MTV’s current state. One of the network’s former executives, Abbey Konowitch, puts it pretty well, “MTV was the last national radio station.”
I don’t watch “Jersey Shore,” but I’m not among those who pine for MTV’s glory days. Most of the performers I care about still make videos, and many of these are lovely. You can track them down — as well as live performances, which are better than videos anyway — on YouTube.
VH1 still broadcasts a weekly “Top 20 Countdown,” which is worth taping. Good stuff sneaks in there, occasionally, by total accident. The experience of watching “Top 20 Countdown” is greatly enhanced by a bit of technology I didn’t have in the early 1980s: the fast-forward button. |
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| From: LindyBill | 10/26/2011 7:02:45 AM | | | | | | The Real Scare Is Not Being Scary
Universal Orlando Resort
Universal Orlando's Halloween Horror Nights feature eight elaborate haunted houses and require intense, year-round planning and construction.
By BROOKS BARNES Published: October 25, 2011
NEW YORK TIMES
ORLANDO, Fla. — Chainsaws? Yawn. Bathtub electrocutions? Done them. Demented, blood-thirsty clowns? So 2001.
Enlarge This Image
Sheri Lowen/Universal Orlando Resort To scare its Halloween Horror Nights visitors moving on foot, Universal Orlando uses lighting, fog machines, video projections and actors popping up in the rooms of haunted houses.
For Universal Orlando, the big theme park here that counts on Halloween as a crucial profit center, the art of the scare sure isn’t as easy as it used to be.
The challenge is not size or money. Universal spends millions to stage and market its Halloween Horror Nights, which this year include eight haunted houses and multiple “scare zone” street parties on 25 nights. No, the scarce resource is ideas: coming up with new ways to entertain a “been-there, screamed-at-that” customer base raised on torture movies like “Saw” and bloody video games.
“These people are paying to get the bejesus scared out of them, and every year it gets harder,” said Patrick Braillard, a show director for the park. “We look at each other and say, ‘What’s left to do?’ ”
It’s no small worry. This movie-centered theme park, owned by Comcast’s NBC Universal, would not provide Halloween-related financial details, but the revenue appears to be considerable. Entry to Horror Nights starts at $42 (although discounts are available), and analysts estimate that as many as 500,000 a year have attended. Add in sales of beer, food and merchandise, and substantial profits are at stake.
Desperate to increase their off-season business, theme parks started circling Oct. 31 on their calendars in the late 1990s, led by Universal on the East Coast and Knott’s Berry Farm in California. It was a smart call: America’s obsession with Halloween as a cultural event was just starting to spike, and even in a stagnant economy, the growth shows few signs of slowing. The National Retail Federation estimates that total Halloween spending in the United States this year will total $6.8 billion, up from $3.3 billion in 2005.
Along the way, theme parks have played a major role in globalizing the holiday. Universal Studios Singapore is holding its first Horror Nights this year, for instance, while Disney now mounts Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween events at its parks in Paris, Hong Kong and Tokyo, as well as the United States.
Here in central Florida, the haunted house scene has become rather, well, cutthroat. In 1990, when Universal first staged a horror event, it didn’t take much more than a couple of boos and a bowl of spaghetti guts to spook visitors. Since then, Disney’s Magic Kingdom, Sea World and Busch Gardens have steadily increased their own Halloween offerings.
To keep their footing on this shifting terrain — that is, to keep scaring people and making money from it — Universal’s fright makers have turned to an intense, year-round planning and construction regimen. “A fright factory,” said Mike Aiello, another show director with the park’s creative team.
Preparation starts in early October for the following year’s Horror Nights, Mr. Aiello said. The creative team starts by spewing out ideas and listing them on a white board, then spending several weeks culling and refining concepts and sometimes combining them. Over the years the park has burned through existing Halloween characters — Freddy Krueger, Jason and his hockey mask — so the goal is to invent new horror stories.
This year, for instance, a haunted house called “Nightingales: Blood Prey” is a mash-up of two concepts thrown on that board: terror in a World War I trench and demonic nurses that feast on the weak and dying.
The park sometimes gets help from its corporate cousin Universal Pictures. This year both Universal in Orlando and Universal Studios Hollywood, near Los Angeles, constructed haunted houses around “The Thing,” a remake of John Carpenter’s 1982 horror classic. Universal Pictures released that film on Oct. 14 to bleak results; ticket sales total about $15 million.
Once the park planners select general concepts, the next step involves using graph paper to plot the maze interiors of the houses, each of which has about 10 rooms or scenes. A good scare is usually about the unknown for the visitor, but it’s all about control for the park, explained Jim Timon, Universal Orlando’s senior vice president for entertainment. Planners have to think about things like capacity and the flow of visitors, along with local safety ordinances.
In a way, haunted houses are more difficult to pull off than more elaborate theme park rides that involve cars on tracks. A vehicle allows Universal to control the experience — riders face in one direction — but haunted houses, where people are on foot, must scare in 360 degrees. To terrify an increasingly desensitized customer, Universal relies on lighting, fog machines, room temperature, water sprays, music cues, smells, video projection, wind and even fake snow. A recent addition to the fright toolbox has been actors flying with the help of wires.
Once the architecture of the rooms is planned, stories for each must be plotted. Universal keeps a type of research library stocked with pertinent books for inspiration (“A Pictorial History of the American Carnival,” “The Pop-Up Book of Phobias”) and urges its creative personnel to roam Florida in search of ideas. Old Spanish forts in the region helped inform the design for one of this year’s houses.
By late January, Universal technicians are building 3-D computer models that allow Mr. Timon’s team to take virtual tours through each maze. “We’re looking for ways to increase the startle,” Mr. Timon said. “Move a wall, change an angle.”
A crew of five artists and designers then compiles detailed design books for each house. These books, about 80 to 110 pages each, include colored sketches for set decorations and costumes that will be worn by actors hired to jump out of various nooks and crannies. Audio and lighting design takes up most of March and April, while construction starts in May and lasts through August, Mr. Timon said.
Universal hires the actors in July casting sessions. In total, the park hires about 1,000 temporary workers for Horror Nights, judging their abilities partly by orchestrating scream tests. “You want to make sure they have the lungs to keep going all night,” Mr. Aiello said.
Horror Nights, which Universal markets as “not recommended” for children under 13, started this year on Sept. 23. The park closes for each Horror Night at 5 p.m. and reopens as a haunted version at 6:30.
On a Thursday night this month, the scene before reopening was frantic, as dozens of actors arrived, changed into their costumes and stopped by one of 28 makeup stations to be painted with bullet holes, rotting flesh and blood. Appendages were arranged on tables. “Kristen S. : Retrieve your prosthetic arm!” a cranky-sounding prop manager yelled.
As guests flooded into the park, Mr. Aiello looked around with pride. Has Universal pulled it off for another year? “I have personally seen people exit these houses on their hands and knees,” he said.
A customer, Angela Gutierrez, offered more of a mixed critique. “I was hanging onto my boyfriend for dear life,” said Ms. Gutierrez, a 24-year-old restaurant worker, after emerging from a house called “The In-Between,” which uses 3-D effects.
But she was blasé about the woman encased in a glass coffin with live rats. Her assessment: “They did that last year too.” |
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| From: Jo Ellen T | 10/26/2011 10:35:13 AM | | | | | | Steven Tyler's name is now trending on twitter so I checked it out. He had a bad fall in the shower, due to dehydration, rushed to the hospital, some say he lost some teeth. That's according to tweets anyway.
Hope everyone is here is doing well ! Don't get a chance to check in very often.
Jo Ellen |
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| From: LindyBill | 10/26/2011 10:49:34 AM | | | | | | Apple may be getting ready to reinvent TV
Remarks by late co-founder Steve Jobs in a new biography have set off a flurry of speculation that Apple will roll out a TV set that could remake the industry.
The late Steve Jobs speaks to members of the media during an Apple product unveiling event in San Francisco in 2010. Apple and Jobs have a record of taking existing technologies and redesigning them with an emphasis on visual simplicity. (David Paul Morris, Bloomberg / October 26, 2011)
By David Sarno, Los Angeles Times October 25, 2011, 6:14 p.m.
Now that Apple Inc.'s chief visionary is gone, the company is facing a billion-dollar question: Will it be able to conjure another pioneering product without Steve Jobs?
Perhaps fittingly, a possible answer came posthumously from Jobs himself.
The television set, the quintessential squawk box of the 20th century, is ripe for a reinvention, the Apple co-founder said before he died Oct. 5.
"I'd like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use," Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson in the new book "Steve Jobs," which hit shelves this week. "It would be seamlessly synched with all of your devices and … will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it."
His remarks in the book have set off a flurry of speculation that Apple will roll out a television set that could remake the $100-billion industry, much as the company altered personal computers, music players and cellphones.
Apple and Jobs have a record of taking existing technologies and redesigning them with an emphasis on visual simplicity, allowing users to play songs, open applications and make calls with the click of a mouse or the swipe of a finger — with little technical knowledge required.
But over the last decade, television systems have gone in the other direction, with remote controls sprouting dozens of buttons, many for obscure functions that consumers don't use. Meanwhile, cable TV's grid of hundreds of shows and channels has become overgrown and difficult to navigate.
"My parents come to my house and there are three remotes to work the TV," said Peter Misek, an analyst at Jefferies & Co. "I literally have to change the station for them because they're freaked out to try it themselves. That's a disaster."
For some analysts, Jobs' declaration to Isaacson has confirmed what they already suspected. Brian White of Ticonderoga Securities wrote to investors Tuesday that he had seen "concrete evidence that an Apple Smart TV was already flowing through factories over in China in early stage pilot and prototype production."
White said Apple was well positioned to take advantage of the global television market. Television manufacturing is generally considered a cutthroat business with narrow profit margins, in which competitors like Samsung Electronics, Sony and Panasonic Corp. vie for customers by offering ever lower prices on their TV sets.
But White believes that Apple will be able to charge twice or even three times the going rate for TVs because of what he called Apple's "unmatched aesthetics, expansive digital ecosystem and overall quality."
Apple has been able to build highly profitable businesses with its iPhone and Mac computers, both of which have been priced at the high end of the market.
Industry watchers believe that Apple has been laying the groundwork for a television set for years, intensifying its focus recently on developing high-resolution, TV-like screen technology for its iPhones and iPad tablet computers, and on software that works across all of its devices and allows users to manage and store broad swaths of their digital lives.
Apple this month also introduced a sophisticated voice-control system for the new model of its iPhone. Called Siri, the software is able to understand free-form spoken commands, including scheduling meetings, writing emails, checking the weather and finding restaurants. If built into a television, that system could help users find shows and information without having to make a long series of button pushes.
At the same time, Apple has been expanding the size of its iTunes digital store, which now allows consumers to quickly purchase and download millions of songs, games, movies and television shows through the Internet.
The missing piece, many analysts believe, is Apple's ability to offer traditional broadcast television, a business long dominated by cable giants like Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Cable Inc.
That could be partially resolved with a broadcast partnership with AT&T Inc., which offers a TV service called U-verse, Misek said. AT&T is a longtime Apple ally and the iPhone's first wireless carrier beginning in 2007.
But Shaw Wu, an analyst at Sterne Agee, said Apple might have a more ambitious and disruptive plan in store, one that could upend the business model that television networks have relied on since the rise of cable in the 1980s.
Citing industry sources, Wu said Apple "would love to offer users the ability to choose their own customized programming" — paying for channels individually rather than buying dozens together in "tiers," as is typical today for cable subscribers. "This would change the game for television and give [Apple] a big leg up against the competition," Wu wrote in a note to investors.
Such a move would be difficult to achieve without the support of Hollywood media companies, which have long opposed efforts to "unbundle" television subscriptions out of fear that that would decimate a multibillion-dollar revenue stream.
But Apple watchers are fond of pointing out that the company has managed to upend established business models before, including the record industry's now largely dissipated network of retail stores and their racks of CDs.
Apple may be arriving to the television business at just the right time, when mobile devices, personal computers and television sets are able to communicate with one another much more effectively.
"Five years ago everything [in TV manufacturing] was centralized and individualized," said Dan Muratta, who runs the broadband division of Broadcom Corp., which supplies wireless networking chips to Apple's iPhones and iPads.
But with new technology, "I may be watching a program on my TV and I want to watch it on the tablet or smartphone, and voila," he said. "The more forward-thinking companies are taking advantage of that." |
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| To: LindyBill who wrote (6356) | 10/26/2011 12:32:39 PM | | From: Uncle Frank | | | | I agree totally with your opinion of her performance. Watched it twice. As I did JR's dance.
Funny, but I wasn't nearly as impressed with her performance on last night's results show. The torch song from her new album made her voice sound thin and reedy. The little lady sounds best when she's belting out a big song.
But I was very impressed with Tony's dance partner. Wowza. |
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