household name : : : blog

Vacation Notice

Crickets.

Hear them?

That's the sound of us not writing for two weeks.

U2's 360˚ Stage

[click photos to enlarge]

One of the many reasons U2 is the biggest and best live act in the world is that they always keep refreshing the product; new look, new packaging, new songs...and new stage designs. (Above, Barcelona.)

[Photo: Diana Scrimgeour]

[Photo: Alex Maragos]

Above, at Wembley Stadium, London.

[Photo above: Ralph Larmann]

And Milano.

Early design illustration of "The Claw."

 

(Above: A stolen shot of the Camp Nou stage under construction more. Below: Testing at the StageCo site in Werchter, Belgium.)

Building "The Claw" Video

The U2 360° tour opening at the Nou Camp Stadium (below) in Barcelona June 30th is the band’s first stadium outing since the 2005 Vertigo Tour and follows the release of their acclaimed album, No Line On The Horizon

Long-time show director Willie Williams has worked again with architect Mark Fisher to create an innovative 360˚ design which will doubtless be a living hell for the roadies, but affords an unobstructed view for the audience.

Produced by Live Nation Global Touring, U2 360° will visit 14 cities across Europe including dates in Milan, Gothenburg, Amsterdam, Paris, Nice, Dublin, Chorzow, Zagreb, Berlin, Gelsenkirchen, London, Sheffield and Glasgow before finishing at Millennium Stadium in Cardiff on 22nd August. 

The European tour will be followed by dates in North America beginning at Chicago’s Soldier Field on September 12th, 2009.

Above, an inverted section of the main support structure currently under construction at StageCo in Wechter, Belgium. Test builds of the stage begin May 12 along with simultaneous tests of the video screens, designed by Chuck Hoberman and Frederic Opsomer.

Hell, and to think I saw them on the Boy Tour with a few hundred people.

 

Show openers on selected show dates:

Muse

Snow Patrol

Black Eyed Peas

More  Links:

360 Stage Animation

Tickets For Sale

 
 

Brand 'O The Week : Progressive

Can't remember when an insurance company last sent me a rate reduction email.

And so it begins: prices drop to realistic and more sustainable levels in line with reduced consumer income.

It's a most welcome trend.

Site 'O The Week : Bad Obama Paintings

Presidential hero-worship reaches new levels on this site dedicated to those who aim to capture the man on canvas.

Bad Art Here

War Against Cliches

While catching up on some reading recently I decided it's time to call time on cliches.

Cliches are heard writing, heard thinking. They're dead freight and the sign of a lazy writer. If you've heard them once, you've heard them a thousand times before––and that's 999 times too many.

Henceforth the following shall be denied entry to the novel:

The heat was stifling.
She rummaged through her handbag.
The air was raw.
Drum up some business.
Back to the drawing board.
It's water under the bridge.
The grass is always greener.

Feel free to add your unfavorites to the list...

Quote 'O The Day : Darwinism 2009

"It's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change."

As in life; as in business.

-

Organization The Secret To Long Life

 

Bad news for all the messy-deskers out there: organized and conscientious people live longer than those who are impulsive, a study has found.

The work, by the University of California, suggests that psychological traits can be as important in predicting health as medical and social factors and conscientious people can live up to four years longer.

Howard Friedman, professor of psychology at the university said: "Not only do conscientious individuals have better health habits and less risk-taking, but they also [have] more stable jobs and marriages and may even have a biological predisposition toward good health."

Highly conscientious people live on average two to four years longer, are less likely to smoke or drink to excess, and live more stable and less stressful lives, Prof Friedman found.

Prof Friedman and his assistant Margaret Kern looked at three facets of conscientiousness – self-control, organization and industriousness – and found the second two were most closely linked to longevity.

Other healthy traits included thoroughness, reliability, deliberation, competence and dutifulness.

"There is some evidence that people can become more conscientious, especially as they enter stable jobs or good marriages," Ms Kern said. "We think our findings can challenge people to think about their lives and what may result from the actions they do.

"Even though conscientiousness cannot be changed in the short term, improvements can emerge over the long run as individuals enter responsible relationships, careers and associations."

The study, published in the journal Health Psychology, analyzed data from 20 studies that focused on conscientiousness-related traits and longevity, and involved more than 8,900 participants from the US, Canada, Japan, Germany, Norway and Sweden.

Hollywood Knows Nothing

The again, neither do most 'experts.'

The most famous dictum about Hollywood belongs to the screenwriter William Goldman. “Nobody knows anything,” Goldman wrote in “Adventures in the Screen Trade” a couple of decades ago. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess.”

One of the highest-grossing movies in history, “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” was offered to every studio in Hollywood, Goldman writes, and every one of them turned it down except Paramount: “Why did Paramount say yes? Because nobody knows anything. And why did all the other studios say no? Because nobody knows anything. And why did Universal, the mightiest studio of all, pass on Star Wars? . . . Because nobody, nobody—not now, not ever—knows the least goddamn thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.”

What Goldman was saying was a version of something that has long been argued about art: that there is no way of getting beyond one’s own impressions to arrive at some larger, objective truth. There are no rules to art, only the infinite variety of subjective experience.

“Beauty is no quality in things themselves,” the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote. “It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.” Hume might as well have said that nobody knows anything.

He went on: “A class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge,” he argued.

“The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied.”

When Whiteboards Dream

Imagine an 'Idea Room' panelled floor-to-ceiling with white boards.

Ahhh, a creative's dream.