If it’s showtime, it’s Trajan.

Go to the movies, and there’s usually one typeface getting more than its share of screentime. The folks at Goodiebag put the Trajan mania in perspective.
However, if this year’s crop of best picture nominees for an Oscar are any indication, the tide may be turning. Juno uses hand-drawn lettering that matches its animated title sequence. There Will Be Blood features a calligraphic font that, well, bleeds. The original theatrical poster for Michael Clayton uses Eurostile Bold Extended to spell out the title character’s name. Atonement goes retro with a typewritten font, a generously kerned, all-caps Prestige Elite. The folks at Linotype take a look at other movie fonts here.

It’s hularrefic!

Some infomercials are funny and don't even know it. “Hawaii Chair while answering phones, using the computer, balancing books or filing paperwork.” How about while performing Lasik surgery? Even Ellen gets into the hot seat with this one.

What to expect when you’re expecting an end to the writers’ strike

It’s only been three months, but it seems so much longer. Finally, an end to the writers’ strike appears imminent. (Even Cindy Adams has written about it, kids.) No word yet on what was the tipping point. Fatigue? The upcoming Oscars? The DGA settlement?

So what’s changed? Of course there’s a potential new deal, which may or may not resemble the package the Directors’ Guild ratified a few weeks ago. And The New York Times speculates writers may experience some grudges when they return to the set. In fact, several high-profile development deals (Joan of Arcadia producer Barbara Hall, Brothers & Sisters creator Jon Robin Baitz, among others) have already been axed, with studios citing force majeure.

When are existing shows coming back? Some ABC titles – Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty – expect to crank out scripts for four to five episodes which would then air in April and May. Newer shows, like Pushing Daisies, will likely send its writers back to the table but won’t have new shows on air until the fall. (Sigh.) The handful of multi-camera sitcoms on the air nowadays (Back to You, Two and Half Men and The Big Bang Theory) could be on the air sooner, thanks to shorter production schedules. Mindless reality programming will continue to be a staple until scripted content is available. And maybe even longer, as long as episodes of American Gladiators pull in twice as many viewers as Friday Night Lights. (Double sigh.)

CBS is bringing back living-room voyeurism this month with another edition of Big Brother. However, Black Rock execs are borrowing from premium-cable sibling Showtime for Dexter, which will make a sanitized debut on CBS on Sunday, February 17.

Daily comedy shows – The Daily Show, Colbert Report, Late Night with Conan O’Brien – have been trooping along admirably, mocking the fact that they’re officially writerless yet still churning out an entertaining product every night. Those shows should see an uptick in both laughs and general tenor once they’re reunited with their writers. And hopefully it’s not too late for an Andy Samberg digital short on Saturday Night Live about Chuck Norris’ support for Mike Huckabee. (Goodness knows we've been denied the comedic stylings of Kristen Wiig for too long, while off-the-air Amy Poehler has gone stir crazy.)

As far as the business of show business goes, the pilot season has changed forever. Traditionally, networks would sink millions of dollars into filming pilots that programming execs would use to determine their slate of shows for the fall. Only a handful of those shows ever saw the light of day. Expect more “backdoor” pilots spun off of existing programs, much the way Private Practice emerged from the, er, loins of Grey’s Anatomy. And get ready for pilots masquerading as TV movies. Cue the Knight Rider music. And expect just fewer pilots in general. The three-hour extravaganzas in April that unveil the fall schedules – the Upfronts – will change. Probably smaller and less puffy.

And last but not least, fingers are crossed and double crossed that we’ll still get a few more episodes of 30 Rock – “the best show on TV” according to NBC’s Co-Chairman of Entertainment Ben Silverman – this season.

Huckabee Grudge Match

This blog isn’t typically a forum for antics reminiscent of the Three Stooges. There are, however, notable exceptions.

It’s a Macworld...

...and we get to live in it. Apple unveiled the ultra-thin MacBook Air at San Francisco’s Moscone Center on Tuesday. Watch the keynote address here. (Or read Engadget’s live play-by-play.) New York Times’ columnist and CNBC contributor David Pogue sums up the major announcements here.

1) A one-terabyte, wireless back-up drive called Time Capsule that sells for $500
2) New software for the iPhone that pinpoints your location using cell towers and wireless hotspots
3) Movie rentals from iTunes for $4; movies last 24 hours but can be started on one platform – such as a laptop – paused and then picked up on another – such as an iPhone
4) A 23% price drop to $230 on Apple TV and software enhancements
5) the three-pound, super-slim $1800 MacBook Air

“One of the most significant things in this MacBook Air was that they’re introducing a lot of gesture-based user interface,” says Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal.

“If you have a picture...you can do what they call pinching. You do it on the touch pad, not on the screen...That in some ways may end up being the biggest legacy,” Mossberg adds. ”All thin notebooks have compromises...It only has one way to get on the Internet – wirelessly. It doesn’t have an ethernet jack...Now that may be okay. Sometimes Apple moves ahead of the industry dropping features.”

The slenderella laptop won’t hit the stores for another two weeks. And Mossberg hasn’t taken the laptop for a test drive yet, so it’ll take a few weeks before he writes his first review. But the machine already has one grumbler. A hrrumph from Slate, natch. However, MacBook Air already has some third-party accessories, namely a vinyl laptop sleeve that looks just like an inter-office envelope.

Pogue further reports on the hypnotic charms of a Steve Jobs keynote here. (Sorry, the Grey Lady doesn’t do embedable video yet.) But somebody did catch Pogue’s, uh, cabaret act at Macworld, posted above. It’s one part Mark Russell, one part Roberta Flack and two parts Cupertino.

Meanwhile, Gizmodo wonders if design cues to future Apple products can be found in Braun electronics from the ’60s. In a side-by-side comparison of Apple and Braun products, Gizmodo proposes that past performance will predict future results. But one could also argue that Braun’s Dieter Rams and Apple’s Jonathan Ive just share a great eye for clean, simple design with a purpose, no matter the decade. However, everybody can get the signature Steve Jobs look here.

Splitsville for One Laptop Per Child & Intel

So much for staying together for the sake of the children. The unusual collaboration between non-profit One Laptop Per Child and for-profit Intel has fallen apart. The “frail partnership...was undone last month in part by an Intel saleswoman: She tried to persuade a Peruvian official to drop the country’s commitment to buy a quarter-million of the organization’s laptops in favor of Intel PCs,” according to The New York Times.

“They played another dirty trick in Peru,” OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte told The Times. “It’s a little bit like McDonald’s competing with the World Food Program.”

In Peru, where One Laptop has begun shipping the first 40,000 PCs of a 270,000 system order, Isabelle Lama, an Intel saleswoman, tried to persuade Peru’s vice minister of education...that the Intel Classmate PC was a better choice for his primary school students. Unfortunately for Intel, the vice minister is a longtime acquaintance of Mr. Negroponte...The education minister took notes on his contacts with the Intel saleswoman and sent them to One Laptop officials... Until Intel surprised him by quitting on Thursday, Mr. Negroponte said he had still held out some hope that the relationship could be saved. The Intel XO was supposed to be introduced next week at the Consumer Electronics Show in keynote speeches to be made by Mr. Negroponte and Mr. Otellini, but the prototype will now be set aside.

Intel told the Wall Street Journal it was breaking up with OLPC and pulling its representative from the OLPC board. “We've reached a philosophical impasse with OLPC,” said an Intel spokesman. Intel favors offering many solutions to developing countries, not just the OLPC laptop, according to the spokesman. Intel markets a competitive product called the Classmate.

Negroponte remains optimistic that OLPC can sell two to thre million PCs this year. In its recent holiday promotion, the foundation raised $35 million and sold 167,000 units. But for Negroponte sometimes geography outranks the numbers. “If I can sell 1.5 million computers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ethiopia, I will feel a lot better than other sales we might make.”

Meanwhile over at CNET, Tom Krazit offers up a “teach a man to fish” approach. “Perhaps the best way to help developing countries get in on the technology revolution is to teach them how to design--not merely assemble--their own products, rather than coming to them from lofty perches in Cambridge and Santa Clara saying, ‘Don't worry, we know best.’”

A new museum for the New Museum

“[T]he New Museum of Contemporary Art, on the Bowery at Prince Street on the Lower East Side, is the kind of building that renews your faith in New York as a place where culture is lived, not just bought and sold,” writes Nicolai Ouroussoff in The New York Times. The (recently renewed) critic points out a few architectural highlights in an interactive piece here.

The architects behind the space are Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the Tokyo-based firm SANAA. “The Bowery was very gritty when we first visited it,” the architects explain. “We were a bit shocked, but we were also impressed that a contemporary art museum wanted to be there...The New Museum is a combination of elegant and urban. We were determined to make a building that felt like that.”

Paul Goldberger of The New Yorker hearts the building, too – for the structure and how it relates to its location. “Sejima and Nishizawa have designed a building that is just right for this moment of the Bowery’s existence. It is a pile of six boxes, stacked unevenly, like a child’s blocks. Sometimes the blocks mount up in a pattern of setbacks like that of a traditional New York building; sometimes they jut out over open space in a way that suggests the architects had something more radical in mind. The building is original, but doesn’t strain to reinvent the idea of a museum.”

For this blogger, one of the most striking features was the glass curtainwall at the street level. It allows the sidewalk to extend into the museum, and outside foot traffic is visible even all the way back in the rear gallery, near the café. The narrow staircase that connects the third and fourth floors is an intriguing passageway between galleries, and even affords room for a confessional-like exhibition space. And of course the building’s stacked-box silhouette lends itself to becoming an icon, like Frank Lloyd Wright's spiraling ramp for the Guggenheim. In fact, advertising created by Droga5 for the New Museum already uses the New Museum’s distinctive profile.

UPDATE: Nishizawa and Sejima give The Japan Times an interview here. They talk about how their partnership started – at first he (Nishizawa) was working for her (Sejima). And they elaborate on how the building got its distinctive shape. “First, with a plot of land as small as that 740 sq. meters, there was no alternative but to stack the galleries on top of each other. But when you put galleries on top of each other, you end up with a high-rise building, right? ...[A]ll the floors end up the same and...the building ends up looking more like an office tower than a museum. So we decided that each floor needed to look different from the others, and to achieve that we needed to vary their sizes,” says Nishizawa.

Konichiwa, Muji

Japanese retailer Muji opened its first U.S. store yesterday, bringing its practical yet well-designed line of housewares, stationery and clothing to New York City. The first store is in SoHo on Broadway, just a few blocks away from another Japanese retailer, Uniqlo. A second Muji store reportedly opens next month in the office tower Renzo Piano designed for the New York Times. Gothamist and Racked weigh in with their takes on – and pics of – the downtown outpost.

Muji’s products are free of logos; the company’s name is a shortened version of “mujirushi ryohin” which translates as no-brand, quality goods. Catering to a well-traveled, international crowd, the store has just about every size of vial for all your emollients, collapsable travel bags, slippers as well as shirts and socks made of recycled yarn. (It’s not as gross as it sounds. They’re made from scraps.)

Prices on dishes, kitchen utensils and paper goods were reasonable while clothing seemed more expensive than what one would expect. (Perhaps a result of the weak dollar?) One curious item: a pair of men’s corduroy pants that seemed perfectly normal, except around the waist. Where beltloops would normally be, there was a large piece – about three inches tall – of forgiving elastic, like you’d find in a pair of pregnancy jeans. The price for these “Thanksgiving Dinner” pants? $89.50. (Write your own MasterCard “priceless” punchline in the comment section.) They’re probably just some comfortable pants for a long-haul flight.

Philanthropnology

Last year, this blog covered the expected specs for the XO computer developed by the One Laptop Per Child foundation. Well, the price has gone up a little, and it's not solely for export anymore. This week the XO hit the U.S. and Canadian markets in a special give-one-get-one offer that runs through November 26.

“For a donation of $399, one XO laptop will be sent to empower a child in a developing nation and one will be sent to the child in your life in recognition of your contribution,” according to OLPC's web site. And for the laptop you keep, T-Mobile is providing free wi-fi service at its HotSpots for a year. Or, if you'd prefer to just make a donation, $200 will pay for one laptop.

Check out Leslie Stahl's excellent 60 Minutes interview with OLPC’s Nicholas Negroponte and visits to children using the laptop here. (Sorry, there's pre-roll and CBS doesn't release embedable code. But the piece is good, so hang in there.) Masi Oka of Heroes introduces the reverse B.O.G.O. offer in this commercial that's on the air now. Watch it here.

Best Inventions of 2007

The Halloween candy isn't even stale yet, and Time has already published a “Best of 2007” list. The magazine ranks the best inventions of the past, er, current year, and at the top is the iPhone. (Yes, it's an obvious pick, but thankfully less quirky than last year's choice for Person of the Year.) Staff writer Lev Grossman explains how the magazine makes its selects in this video.

Not so surprisingly, many of the innovations involve transportation and ways to make it more efficient and eco-friendly. The Venturi Electric car runs on sun and wind power, while MIT's electric City Car stacks up like luggage carts at the airport. A gas-steam hybrid engine, which makes use of the heat it generates, improves fuel economy 40%. A dual-mode vehicle from HJR Hokkaido Railway Company runs on rails to the end of the line and then the tires take over. A bioethanol concept car from Sweden doesn't have doors but does have a 3-D dash.

French and Indian companies have teamed up to build a car that runs on compressed air. (The same Indian company is also launching a $2,500 car that New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman predicts will wreak even more havoc on infrastructure and the environment. So – just thinking aloud here – how about working on dropping the price of the compressed-air model?) Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, which uses composite materials to lighten its load, also made the list.











Elsewhere on the newsstand, I.D. magazine included the iPhone in its current New + Noteworthy issue. (Sorry, no link available yet.) Other highlights include: some fancy New Balance kicks designed by DDC; Catherine Hammerton's ginko-inspired wallpaper; and Sebastian Wrong's font clocks from Established & Sons. The magazine is also giving away 19 of their picks in a very classy sweepstakes.

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.”

Monster Mashup

At the corner of Smith and Pacific Streets in Brooklyn last night, anyone with a cell phone was a screenwriter, thanks to TXT of the Living Dead. It’s a condensed version of the zombie classic Night of the Living Dead, projected onto a blank wall with dialogue supplied via text messaging.

The brains behind the operation is Paul Notzold, who took about 500 frames from the thriller (relax, it’s in the public domain) and then created speech bubbles for about 150 of those frames. As Notzold explains on his web site, “Text messages sent in from participants show up in those frames in the order that they are received. The movie moves forward when a new message is received. The other frames are action frames that play through automatically until they hit a speech frame. Once all the speech frames have been filled the movie can then be viewed from beginning to end with the new audience generated dialogue.”

The project is part drive-in, part comic book, part Lichtenstein pop-art, part Mad Libs, part New Yorker caption contest and part flash mob. Although the project is uncensored, texters kept it relatively – and surprisingly – clean. There were the made-in-jest marriage proposals, variations on “all your bases are belong to us” and generic greetings (“Hi, Joe”). But there were also plenty of pop culture references (Geico, Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah) out of sync with the narrative, upping the comic effect.

Gothamist.com gave the Halloween-night project its seal of approval. And Wired recently detailed a showing outside Paris. “Notzold's road kit is deceptively simple: a Mac, a projector (and something to stand it on), a camera and a generator. Helpers distribute a cell phone number on pieces of paper -- Notzold always gets a number for the country he is in, making it easy for locals to participate.” Below is footage from the event in France.



What’s next for Notzold and his SMS project? That bastion of inane banter: the 30-minute local news broadcast. Back to you, Bob.

What to expect when you’re expecting a writers’ strike

On Tuesday, a federal mediator joins the talks between the Writers’ Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers. Time's ticking, and it's not looking rosy. “Writers could walk out as early as Thursday if their union can't hammer out a new three-year employment contract with the studios to replace one that expires at midnight on Wednesday,”according to the Los Angeles Times.

So why is everyone at loggerheads? “This showdown between writers and producers is the result of a long-brewing fight over payment for online distribution of TV shows, movies, Webisodes and other new-media content,” explains Maureen Ryan in the Chicago Tribune. “In Hollywood, the WGA-AMPTP battle is widely regarded as a defining moment in the entertainment industry's digital coming-of-age...The guild wants jurisdiction over such works and it wants agreed-upon payment rates for new-media content; it wants an increase in the DVD compensation rate; and it wants a percentage of revenue derived from content sold over the Internet or delivered with advertising.”

And what would TV look like during a strike? Daily, late-night shows will be hit first. In primetime, “Long-running shows like NBC's ‘Law & Order: Special Victims Unit’ are likely to stay in original episodes longer because they are further ahead in production than new programs like ABC's ‘Pushing Daisies,’” writes Brooke Barnes in The New York Times.

Animated series like ''The Simpsons'' and ''Family Guy,'' completed up to a year in advance, are strike-proof for this season at least. Much more problematic are complicated serial dramas like ''Lost,'' which networks typically broadcast without repeats...Networks have been stockpiling reality material in the event of a strike. The CW network alone has five completed reality series ready to go: the returning shows ''America's Next Top Model,'' ''Beauty and the Geek'' and ''Pussycat Dolls Present,'' and the new entries ''Farmer Wants a Wife'' and ''Crowned,'' about beauty pageants.

ABC has two reality shows from Oprah lined up: “Oprah Winfrey's The Big Give” and “Your Money or Your Life.” CBS has ordered up episodes of game show “Million Dollar Password” with Regis Philbin. “Dateline” might even make a comeback on NBC. The Peacock has also floated the idea of running the British version of “The Office.” The networks could possibly dip into their cable offerings for rebroadcast on primetime. FX's “Damages” could air on Fox. Past episodes of USA's “Monk” or the new season of Bravo's “Project Runway” could air on NBC while ABC could replay Lifetime's “Army Wives” or even ABC Family's “Kyle XY” or “Greek.”

Taxi design, redux

A previous post in this blog discussed the new logo gracing the sides of taxis all over New York City. Well, The New York Times has been moderating a very smart discussion about the merits and weaknesses of the logo in its City Room blog. And in the spirit of "if you don't like it, why don't you do it?" they've asked for alternative ideas from design professionals and readers.

Michael Bierut of Pentagram says, "that attempt to combine the NYC logo which is being used elsewhere with T in a circle (why?) and that (again) bluntly rounded off and oddly-spaced A-X-I just seems a little ham handed. Maybe it looked good on paper, but I don’t find it convincing on the side of a cab."

A graphics editor at The Times, Jonathan Corum, goes for the practical and suggests highlighting “the most important piece of information: the medallion number. Encouraging riders to remember (or at least notice) the number of their cab is a simple and cheap public safety measure, and would likely speed the return of lost property.”

For Oscar Bjarnson of Systm, X marks the spot. He borrows iconography from a treasure map for some of the typography. "I’d go with something simple. Maybe a typographic solution with some hint of the new NYC logo embedded."

Readers are weighing in, too. Scott Schwebel asks: What would the t-shirt look like? Well, it gets the Lady Liberty treatment. "New York City represents to the world all that is America and the dream of a better life...Why not try and have that message reinforced everyday on the street with one of our highest profile city experiences/icons?” says Schwebel. The huddled masses yearning to, er, move crosstown.

And Michael Condouris turns the checker pattern into a piece of type. “Make it easy to read, incorporate the checker pattern into the X for a little designiness, and you’ve got something fun, obvious and clear.”

And the partially anonymous reader Amanda P. succinctly incorporates into the logo the action of hailing a cab. Hmm. Perhaps NYC's Taxi & Limousine Commission should have held a contest for the new logo. Smart Design, which pro bono spearheaded the effort behind the current design, could have set up the parameters and shared some of their insight with potential contestants. And a contest might have even eliminated some of the suggested "tweaks" that probably came from the the Commission.

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.


powered by ODEO

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.

Moving violation?

You might have seen this on the side of taxis driving around the city: a new logo. While the pattern on the side of the trunk is a nice nod to checkered cabs of the past, you have to wonder what's going on with that type. (What's a t-axi? What's with the superbold heavy treatment on the NYC?) Admittedly, what used to be on the doors was a mishmash of stencils and decals. But you can't help but wonder if a really, really great opportunity was squandered. Just imagine the t-shirt sales. Even the old logo for the TV show Taxi had some style.

Designing with multiple partners is never easy. Like they say, a camel is a horse designed by committee. The boldfaced NYC logo comes from Wolff Olins, the firm that also designed the symbol for London's 2012 Olympic games. Smart Design led a team that included Antenna Design and Birsel + Seck to create the decals for the Taxi & Limousine Commission. To be fair, the project also included some changes inside the cab. Still one can't help but wonder what the logo would have looked like if Pentagram or Milton Glaser had gotten their hands on it. Unbeige weighs in with some criticism here.

And if you recently noticed some flowers on the tops of taxis, they're part of a projects called "Gardens in Transit" which runs through December. Kids from schools, youth programs and hospitals painted the stained-glass looking flowers on decals as a creative and/or therapeutic outlet.

Mr. Murdoch, tear down this wall.

Will Rupert Murdoch remove the subscription firewall in front of most of the stories on the Wall Street Journal’s site? At a Goldman Sachs conference last week, the mogul explained that "it's certainly on the front burner to decide what to do there." Last year wsj.com pulled in about $50 million in subscriptions.

No decision has been made but a free site "looks like the way we are going," Murdoch said. "Would you lose $50 million in revenue? I don't think so…But you'd lose some tens of millions to start with. Then, if the site is good, I think you'd get much more than that back just in textual search. And I think you'd get not one million paying customers, but, around the world, you'd get 10 to 15 million regular daily hits on it, and that would be the most affluent, the most influential people in the world...And I think that could grow."

Just last week The New York Times dropped its TimesSelect subscription service for some of its online content. The feature produced less revenue than wsj.com, pulling in about $10 million annually, although The Times said that number met its expectations.














“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of nytimes.com. According to an article in the paper, “These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.” Get the story from Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and CNN. (Graphic courtesy of wsj.com.)

The Emmys on Fox

Lost amid all the hullabaloo about the expletives and clumsy, censoring cutaways on Sunday’s Emmy telecast was Stewie & Brian’s salute to TV. And by salute, they mean a song about the “wide selection of trash” on the tube today.

Not surprisingly, Fox made it through unscathed. The section about that network was limited to a few lines about Sanjaya’s performance on American Idol. The other networks got a poke in the eye. Here’s the rundown of insults.

NBC
Scrubs “reminds us that a sitcom doesn’t have to make you laugh.”
“So I hear they’re bringing Seinfeld back to save a little face…And I hear Isaiah Washington is taking Kramer’s place.”

ABC
“They’re always brewing up some brand-new primetime swill…like the Geico cavemen.”
“…With its hits like Desperate Housewives continuing to thrive…And those women look sensational for being 65.”

CBS
“Today they’ve got some shows that are remarkably obscene. Like the show about the little boy who lives with Charlie Sheen.”

Probably the best bit of the song was for HBO. “The Sopranos is a show I’d recommend. Because you never know just how it’s gonna…” Then the audio drops out and they cut to black. Even James Gandolfini laughed at that one.

Interestingly, the song – with different lyrics – appeared on the Family Guy as a rant against the FCC. The same party that made Fox so jittery about all those four-letter words.

And what a nice surprise it was when 30 Rock won for best comedy. Finally, a decent speech from someone. Thank you, Tina Fey.

Pushing Daisies

If you like TV, the new fall season is always a bit like Christmas morning. There are things you’ve been counting down the days for. And things that are just taking up space under the tree like gift-wrapped socks and underwear. Here’s to the new ABC/Warner Bros. show Pushing Daisies being a big, red, shiny new Schwinn.

This past Saturday, the New York Television Festival had a special sneak preview of the show, followed by even more special Q&A with the show’s creator/executive producer Bryan Fuller, director/executive producer Barry Sonnenfeld and one of the leads, Lee Pace. Fuller, who wrote for Heroes last year, explained that the idea came from a story arc he’d considered on another show he’d created: Dead Like Me.

The show delivers so well on so many levels. It’s part fairy tale, part science fiction, part romantic comedy, part criminal procedural. Sonnenfeld and his DP have dialed up the colors to a candy-coated goodness for a story that’s actually quite dark. And he has the cast move through Fuller's smart dialogue at a good clip (like a screwball comedy from the 30's.)

The pilot covers a lot of ground and sets up a unique framework exceptionally well. And Jim Dale – yes, he of the Harry Potter audiobooks – has a great turn as the show’s narrator. Ellen Greene – yes, she of the original Little Shop of Horrors – plays one half of the retired synchronized swimming act, the Darling Sisters. Swoosie Kurtz is the other half. Anna Friel & Lee Pace actually have chemistry. And much of it takes place in a bakery/café that's the shape of a pie. If all of this keeps this up, it looks like every Wednesday at 8 will be like a very good Christmas present. Like a Snoopy Snow Cone Machine.

Pushing Daisies makes its broadcast debut on ABC October 3. Watch it. TiVO it. DVR it.