A Muppetastic Comeback?

The British newspaper The Telegraph writes:

The Jim Henson-created characters may be on their way back thanks to a new Disney Film. In the movie, written by...Jason Segel, the Muppets reunite to save their studio with one last variety show. Should the film go well, it opens up the possibility of a television programme, also written by 28-year-old Segel.

Variety elaborates on how the writer/actor lined up the gig.

In “[Forgetting] Sarah Marshall” Segel’s character writes a “Dracula” musical performed by puppets. Those cloth creatures were custom-made by the Henson puppeteers, and the experience emboldened Segel to pitch his concept for a Muppets movie when he was invited in for a general meeting with exec Kristin Burr. Segel got a deal in the room and enlisted [Nick] Stoller to co-write and direct the project.

Fingers are crossed this project gets done and done right. No word on when production might get underway or when the movie could hit theaters. In the meantime, watch Statler and Waldorf as they bring their balcony curmudgeonliness to the Internet: below, here and here.

UPDATE: The Hollywood Reporter says:

NBC is getting into the holiday spirit with “Letters to Santa -- A Muppets Christmas.” Whoopi Goldberg, “The Sopranos” alums Tony Sirico and Steve Schirripa, “Harry Potter” regular Richard Griffiths and Madison Pettis are set to star in the special alongside Kermit, Fozzie, Gonzo, Miss Piggy and the rest of the muppets gang. “Letters” is set on Christmas Eve when Kermit and company mistakenly avert three letters en route to Santa Claus, which triggers a race against time to bring a happy Christmas to the kids whose wishes were lost in the mail.

But why would Disney, which owns both ABC and the Muppets, sell this to NBC? Why, Bob Iger, why?

MUPPDATE: The New York Times on the planned comeback: “[T]his time the Muppets are getting the “Hannah Montana” treatment, being blasted into every pop-culture nook and cranny that the company owns or can dream up.” The Hannah Montana treatment? Uh-oh. Well, at least Statler & Waldorf are weighing in on the Presidential debates. Harrumph.

Tous les memes

So Weezer packed their latest video with some of the Internet’s biggest memes. Making the greatest hits list are: Diet Coke & Mentos, the Numa Numa kid, Chris “Leave Britney Alone” Crocker, Dramatic Chipmunk, Will It Blend?, Chocolate Rain, the Evolution of Dance shoe-obsessed Kelly and even “All your bases are belong to us.” Matthew Cullen of Motion Theory directed this video equivalent of a stuffed burrito. And Weezer has posted some super-casual behind-the-scenes clips on its YouTube page.

UPDATE: In an oddly unsportsmanlike move, Weezer's official YouTube channel disabled the embed function for this video. Talk about a meta buzzkiller.

An evening with Philip Glass

Just an evening? Well, seven performances actually. The Metropolitan Opera is currently staging Glass’s opera Satyagraha, which depicts Mahatma Gandhi’s life in South Africa from 1893 to 1914. The title means “truth force” and describes Gandhi’s early efforts at non-violent resistance and civil disobedience that he would later use in India. Audio clips are a little tricky to track down, but a piano version of the finale plays here. And the Met has posted “Evening Song” here.

Like Glass’s other bio-opera, Einstein at the Beach, the narrative is incidental. And in this case, it’s actually passages from the Bhagavad Ghita – sung in Sanskrit. The production is a beautiful and surprising piece of theater filled with unexpected elements. A jail created in real time from packing tape, for example. Or a human assembly line functioning as a newspaper’s printing press.

The production is an import from the English National Opera and is directed Phelim McDermott with a big assist from designer Julian Crouch. Key to the whole production is talented troupe of performers from a group aptly called Improbable. On stage, they turned baskets into monsters and newspaper effigies into an out-of-touch elite. The New York Times provides a good look behind the scenes below.


The creative team explains their choice of media for props and scenery: “We decided we wanted to use very humble material in the making of the opera...Mostly what you'll see is baskets and newspaper and corrugated iron...We wanted to take the materials associated with poverty and turn them into something beautiful.”

Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times gives the production a generally favorable review. “Ultimately, despite its formulaic elements, “Satyagraha” emerges here as a work of nobility, seriousness, even purity.” The Guardian was more generous when reviewing the original production at the ENO last year.

Phelim McDermott's staging, undertaken in collaboration with the theatre company Improbable, is also a thing of wonder. The gods of the Hindu pantheon rub shoulders with ordinary humanity. Hope is born from deprivation as sheets of corrugated iron and vast quantities of newsprint are transformed into the symbols of a new order...[T]he whole thing serves as a monumental affirmation of human dignity at a time when many have begun to question its very existence - and for that, we must be infinitely grateful.

Glass describes the impetus for writing the opera in 1980 here. Meanwhile, a new documentary profiling the composer – Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts – is playing in New York and preparing to hit theaters in San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Minneapolis and Washington soon.

Need an album? (Part 2)

Some numbers are trickling in for Radiohead's pay-what-you-want experiment. According to the British version of PaidContent.org, just 38% of downloaders paid for the album. The other 62% took the album as a freebie, paying only the handling charge. PaidContent crunches the numbers further:

The average price paid was $6 (£2.88) [globally] but Americans were more generous, coughing up $8.05 (£3.87)...factor in the freeloaders, however, and it’s more like an average $2.26 (£1.08) on a worldwide basis and $3.23 (£1.55) from Americans. The most common amount offered was below $4 (£1.92), but 12 percent were willing to pay between $8 (£3.84) and $12 (£5.77), around the typical cost of an album from iTunes.

So how much did the group pull in? Well, the band hasn't released any official numbers yet. But Gigwise reports that just a few days after the release, Radiohead moved 1.2 million albums at an average of £4 each, for a total of £4.8 million.

Now, this is money earned with just basic overhead costs but without a label. How much did the band take in when Yorke & Co. were with EMI? CNET did some digging and spoke with an attorney who worked for A&M and has repped Sheryl Crow.

Chris Castle…offered an educated guess about what the British band was earning at the label…He guessed that when royalties were combined with money earned from publishing, Radiohead saw between $3 and $5 for every album sale…Castle also estimates that the band typically sold between 3 and 4 million units worldwide. That would mean Radiohead hauled in between $9 million and $20 million per album.

But Castle cautions that “it's way too early to try and assess whether Radiohead's experiment has failed or not.”

What happened to the jingle?

When’s the last time you heard a jingle on a TV commercial? Recently it seems that jingles are relegated to low-budget spots for local mattress stores. Instead, the big advertisers are going for two kinds of music, depending on their budget. Option one: Real, existing rock/pop songs that use some borrowed interest to lend some cool to the products they're selling. Option two: very catchy tracks by emerging artists. On the airwaves right now is one of the the later, an Old Navy commercial with a track by unsigned artist Ingrid Michaelson. "If you are chilly, here, take my sweater..."

Michaelson's MySpace page was discovered by Secret Road Music, a "management company that specializes in finding little-known acts and placing their works in soundtracks for TV shows, commercials, movies and videogames," according to this story in The Wall Street Journal. As a result, Michaelson had three songs featured on Grey's Anatomy last season. But with success comes some angry fans. On her blog Michaelson writes, "it makes me a bit upset because it seems that some people love knowing about an indie artist, but as soon as they garner some attention, these people get mad! But you have to understand that this is how we make a living!"

Target's "Hello Good Buy" campaign relied on an existing hit and reworked the Beatles'classic "Hello Good-bye." But the retailer also uses new music to soundtrack its spots. Running now is a commercial with music from a group called the Icicles. Maybe you've had the la-ti-da refrain running through your head.

But wait, it doesn't seem the jingle is completely gone. Leave it to reality show producer Mark Burnett to resurrect it. CBS has ordered eight episodes – probably stockpiling for a WGA strike – of a new series tentatively titled "Jingle." According to Variety,

teams of players will be given weekly jingle-writing assignments -- coming up with, say, the next Oscar Mayer wiener song or a new pitch for Coke -- and will then have to perform them in front of a studio audience. Viewer votes will determine a weekly winner (whose ditty will end up in a real ad) and loser (who will go home)...The ultimate winner will likely get a large cash prize and a job at a major ad agency.

A job at an ad agency? In-sourcing music? Maybe the jingle's not dead yet.

Need an album? Take an album.

Can an honor system work when it comes to business? Or art? Admission to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a suggested – not manadatory – $20. A few restaurants and cafés have experimented with a pay-what-you-wish plan. Freakonomist Stephen Dubner has examined the trend among musicians. For example, indie singer/songwriter Jane Siberry has been letting fans decide what's a fair price for her songs. (On average, people are paying her $1.18 per track, with 99 cents as the suggested price.) And on SongSlide, musicians’ songs are available for download on sliding scale, starting at 59 cents.

And now a really, really big band is doing the same thing. Downloads of Radiohead’s new album, "In Rainbows," go on sale on October 10 for whatever you want to pay.

The Wall Street Journal does the math in this piece. “Consider the economics of the average CD. It retails for about $16 and costs about $6.40 to manufacture, distribute and sell in a store, research outfit Almighty Institute of Music Retail says...The band pulled the ripcord on EMI, so it doesn't have to share profits or help pay the label's overhead. As a well-known band it's also able to take the knives out on marketing and promotion costs, cutting these by as much as two-thirds. Subtract these expenses and Radiohead may be able to distribute an album for as little as $3.40 a copy.”

CNET calls the deal a "watershed." And the folks at Boing Boing say, “it's such a slap in the record industry's face. An unsigned superband, treating loyal fans and customers like loyal fans and customers instead of thieves -- what a revolutionary concept.”

And are those loyal fans interested? Well, overwhelming demand caused the album's site to crash shortly after details were announced. Word is that Radiohead isn’t making any advance copies available for review, but Rolling Stone has posted some concert versions of the new tracks. Or listen to a classic here.


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UPDATE: How much are fans paying so far? According to NME, about £5 or $10. And a poll by Idolator.com says about 40% plan to pay between $2 and $10 while 18% plan to pay more than $10.

Dramatic chipmunk & friends

Five perfect seconds. Does anyone know what the soundtrack is? Here's a link for the original clip. (The chipmunk was an animal segment on a Japanese TV show.) Now there's even a t-shirt and a Facebook application.


French D.J. combo Justice serves up some great CGI on t-shirts in this video to their catchy single. It seems even the Old Grey Lady has a bit of crush on them in this profile. (The NYT has moved the article behind a paid firewall. Click here for the same article republished in a Scottish newspaper.)


Some clever performance art with the iPhone. There's a company behind it that sells software for "electronic" magicians.

Double takes for U2

One song. Two incredible videos. Director Jonas Odell (with skilled assistance from Nexus Productions and FilmTecknarna) turns flat photographs into a three-dimensional journey through iconic landscapes reminiscent of the group's early album art. Watch Odell & Co.'s video for U2's "Window in the Skies" here.

Now for something completely different, Gary Kroepke and his crew at ad agency Modernista! (their exlamation point, not mine) team up with post-production and effects house The Mill. The result? Other musicians -- from Frank Sinatra to Jimi Hendrix to Nina Simone to Thom Yorke -- bring the song to life. Watch their video. (An ambitious blogger breaks it down scene by scene, guest star by guest star, here.)

The Sound of (Gwen Stefani's) Music

Ran across this video of the Gwen Stefani track "Wind It Up" and was struck with the number of references to "The Sound of Music." The song, produced by the Neptunes, opens with a sample from "The Lonely Goatherd" and even has some yodeling. Director Sophie Muller reinterprets Alpine skies, a nun's habit, the von Trapp estate, scary thunderstorms and playclothes made from drapes. Watch the original goatherd puppet show from the 1965 Robert Wise film here. This isn't Stefani's first foray into borrowing from musicals. Earlier, she teamed up with Eve to rework a "Fiddler on the Roof" song as "Rich Girl."

Everybody's crazy

Jody Rosen of Slate.com has a great piece on the large number of covers out there for the Gnarls Barkley track "Crazy." It seems to be the lingua franca on this summer's music circuit for groups like the Raconteurs, Of Montreal and the Kooks. Even better, Rosen unearths the Ennio Morricone track that's the basis for the song's main riff.