Nine Inch Nails News 2013

Nine Inch Nails' Rhythmic Jack Move 'Hesitation Marks' Makes It Rain Acid Beats
(By Christopher R. Weingarten, Spin.com, August 30 2013)

As a record from the gear-grinding, bloodletting, mud-sweat-and-tears, industrial void-enterer Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, Hesitation Marks is an almost scandalous about-face, powering down the Hate Machine and revving up the Man-Machine, boldly exploring "EBM" for a generation of headbangers still coming to terms with the throbbing gristle of "EDM." As part of a cultural moment, it's the third in a trilogy of bluntly minimal albums — following the Knife's Shaking the Habitual and Kanye West's Yeezus — that retrofit an icon's chosen genre into a blocky, clinical, Piet Mondrian painting. Noise is rendered as tight, impenetrable polygons of sound; beats are clicked together like Duplo bricks in primary colors; 808s are heartbreak; and everyone seems to be jacking to the same circa-1988 Chicago house records.

All of which to say, this is the most important artistic statement from NIN leader Trent Reznor since the late '90s, when SPIN dubbed him "the Most Vital Artist in Music Today." You can follow Reznor's status as a relevant figure because it always runs parallel to his relationship with hip-hop — another genre that hit pop paydirt with noise, repetition, and first-person emotional autopsies. Reznor was Lolla-generation vanguard when he was also on rap's cutting edge: 1989's Pretty Hate Machine churned with the tinny, broken-Walkman, traffic-jam bustle of Public Enemy (thanked in the liner notes, presumably sampled); 1994's The Downward Spiral had the warts-and-all grit and somber confessionals of Wu-Tang Clan ("Hurt" was promptly sampled by Ice Cube's Westside Connection); and 1999's long-awaited The Fragile had the wide-screen auteuristic vision of Dr. Dre (who helped mix) or Puff Daddy (who got a remix).

But during the four albums that made up his '00s output, the very idea of the "vital artist" in pop or alternative music itself got replaced with the messy democracy of the Internet. And while Reznor was an early pioneer of online commerce and conversation, the avowed Pitchfork reader had some trouble staying ahead of the game, spending the majority of the decade chasing the wake of Queens of the Stone Age (2005's "Getting Smaller"), Definitive Jux (2007's "Me, I'm Not"), and James Murphy (2008's "Discipline"), or just teaming with unfashionable dudes like Saul Williams.

Through coincidence or design (he's a Kanye fan), Hesitation Marks surges with the energy of modern hip-hop — hey, the surge of modern everything. Sometimes the beats have the skeletal post-hyphy sproing of DJ Mustard or Droop-E, sometime they work as a harder-rocking counterpoint to the goth-tinged Haus of Pain drone machine that is A$AP Ferg's Trap Lord. It's hard to imagine the Slinky-down-a-staircase drums of "Satellite" and "In Two" happening in a world where Timbaland hadn’t existed. It makes sense that rap's biggest envelope-pusher, Kanye West, and industrial's biggest envelope-pusher both recently turned their live shows into shadow theater — Reznor blowing his shadow up 10 feet tall for his "Tension 2013" tour, Kanye performing as negative space at the Video Music Awards. Both are pop stars who have been proudly reduced by Rick Rubin at some point, literally using a spotlight to negate their role as pop stars. The huge sucking abysses of nothing(.) on their respective albums feel like a final frontier in confrontation. Kickstarted by Portishead (2008's Third), attempted by M.I.A. (2010's MAYA), it's a trend that lets a festival headliner like Reznor make magic on beats that sound like a busted Madlib invasion (check out the stumbling, misaligned hi-hats in "Disappointed") or saxophones that strobe like blinking pixels (see the end of "While I'm Still Here").

And unlike Radiohead, you can dance to it. This is acid. Reznor's clean, crisp, basement-breaking beats are a daze of Phuture's past. Chicago house is already seeing a revival on the gnashing edges of the noise scene (Vatican Shadow, No Fun Acid, Alberich, Unicorn Hard-On) and in the hyper-accelerated world of stadium techno (Skrillex's horror-rave project, Dog Blood, is a metal-up-your-acid mix of Green Velvet gone Black Album). It's already got the potential to be the Internet generation's Ramones T-shirt: moody, abrasive, infectious, aggressively simple. After ten years of having monster drummers (Dave Grohl, Josh Freese, Stephen Perkins) wage war against the machines, Reznor uses a steady, unadorned, corrosive electronic pulse in twin singles "Copy of A" and "Came Back Haunted." The chasms of space are more destructive than, say, writing another "March of the Pigs" — and totally post-modern when you get Lindsey Buckingham to play guitar over them. Only one song allows Ilan Rubin to play "live drums." And when the guitars finally do come in (like on the airy "Running"), they are strangled, choked, tied up, and denied their Jimmy Page orgasms. It's an S and M torture trick.

It's the first time since the Schoolly D wrecking-ball pound of 1989's "Down in It" that Reznor's music has pulsed with the actual sounds of a black art form (the drums of Chicago house, Detroit house, and hip-hop) instead of white punks approximating a black art form (like the Gang of Four and A Certain Ratio beats that propelled '00s singles like "Only" or "The Hand That Feeds"). "All Time Low," a song that splutters like a glitchmower version of David Bowie's "Fame," might be the exception, but remember that the Thin White Duke's groove was superbad enough for James Brown himself to gaffle it outright for 1975's "Hot (I Need To Be Loved, Loved, Loved, Loved)." All in all, Trent makes everything majorly funky for a song with the line, "This paranoia turns to fear."

All of which leaves outlier "Everything," a Camaro blasting a sunny Rick Springfield/Romantics tune right down the centerline of the LP. Even though it's easily the happiest song on an album that boasts lines like, "Yesterday, I found out the world was ending," its aggy New Wave is easily the catchiest thing on the record. It also makes some sort of weird sense in a time where Bruno Mars is approximating the Police and 2 Chainz is rapping over the Knack. Through his own twisted K-hole, #ARTPOP icon Reznor is once again one of the most vital artists working today, coming back haunted, breaking the habitual. Let's get physical.

http://www.spin.com/reviews/nine-inch-nails-hesitation-marks-trent-reznor-columbia-acid/?utm_source=em&utm_medium=dailynl&utm_campaign=090113&utm_content=article1

Trent Reznor's Upward Spiral

(Written By David Marchese, Spin Magazine, August 25 2013)

This summer — Nine Inch Nails' first as a living, breathing entity in four years — Trent Reznor has been taking the stage alone. Muscular and short-haired, he opens his shows by marching to a synthesizer in full view of tens of thousands of festivalgoers, all of whom had strong reason to believe they might never see this band again. Usually wearing a sleeveless black t-shirt, heavy boots, and cargo shorts, he begins to sing the stealthy "Copy of A," a track from Hesitation Marks, the imminent new NIN album those same festivalgoers had equally strong reason to believe might never exist.  "That moment is our reintroduction," says Reznor, seated on a red leather couch in a conference room at Hollywood's posh Soho House, a cocktail-jazz version of Nirvana's "Lithium" clinking quietly in the background. "It's supposed to challenge the audience. I didn't want to come out and signal that we're just a band playing songs you know we're going to play."  He cocks his head, as if considering a problem he's still in the process of solving. "I haven't had a chance to live with the show yet, so it's hard for me to tell what people think."  Indeed, these things take time, but over nearly a quarter-century of Nine Inch Nails, Reznor has learned that if you tackle the hardest things first, the rest of it has a way of working out.

For roughly 80 percent of the band's existence, a bet on Trent Reznor sitting in a room like this discussing his career in early August 2013 would've drawn long odds. The reasons range from the mundane (his industrial baby-step years spent in Cleveland) to the medical (a personally confused, chemically indulgent '90s) to the plainly literal (a burnt-out Reznor told a 2009 Bonnaroo crowd, "This is our last-ever show in the United States").  Yet here we are, in a brief window between gala appearances at Lollapalooza and San Francisco's fellow multi-day extravaganza Outside Lands, with gigs on the European muddy-field circuit approaching quickly, and solo North American arena dates looming on the horizon.  "I'm at a peak of exhaustion right now," says Reznor, who minus a scowl (and plus some longer pants) largely retains his onstage guise offstage. He's sipping from both a cup of coffee and a can of Diet Coke, and is a polite, even friendly presence, firm with his handshake and quick with a smile. "I was shooting a video till three in the morning. The last few weeks have been terribly intense. The way I work is that up to the last second stuff looks like shit, and at the last minute it comes together. But I feel like I've done good work, and there's still an audience there. I'm not looking out at the crowd and seeing a bunch of orthodontists. It's new faces that look like the old ones, if that makes any sense. It feels valid to be back."

That's because more than at any time since the release of 1994's self-loathing alt-angst classic The Downward Spiral — an album to which Hesitation Marks ruefully nods across the decades — Nine Inch Nails, and their formerly tortured and wraithlike leader, once again have the zeitgeist on a leash. The man who once made it a mission to jolt rock beyond its guitar/bass/drums doldrums has delivered a heavily electronic LP into a world where binary code is now just accepted as what makes music go. The band's ticket sales are stronger than ever, and the David Lynch-directed video for self-reflexive first single "Came Back Haunted" quickly earned more than two million YouTube views. Reznor's sound — confrontational, fiercely technological, pretty damn catchy — now reverberates through the banging aggression of American dubstep and the visceral clang of so much contemporary hip-hop.

For English producer Evian Christ, who contributed to Kanye West's electronically noisy Yeezus, "There's been a resurgence in the influence" of Reznor-indebted music. "I'll always be grateful to Trent for sparking my interest in music that I would otherwise never have been aware of." And in a period when the digital world is throwing off the brightest, sexiest creative sparks, Reznor has diversified, pointing his sharp mind at the puzzle of streaming music, working with Beats by Dre to develop what the company hopes will be the ultimate subscription-based music service, due to launch in a limited fashion this fall.  But Reznor knows better than most that riding these socio-cultural waves is as much a matter of luck as sweat. "There's always been an element of 'right time, right place' to Nine Inch Nails," he says. "When we stepped onstage at Woodstock '94, I could sense it. I get goosebumps thinking about it now. Like, 'I don't know how we did this, but somehow we've touched a nerve.' And then as you move forward, you realize that you can't set yourself up for doing that again. So the fact that our music may or may not be in the air now and people seem eager for it, and that I'm working on something with Beats that's a marriage of humanity and technology, which is sort of what my music has always been about, and I'm doing this after years of working on my own trying to figure out how best to get music to the people who want to hear it — you can't plan for those things. It's just the way the world works."

At some point in the not-too-distant future, Trent Reznor's sons, two-year-old Lazarus and one-year-old Balthazar, are going to hear their father sing "Closer," complete with its chorus of "I wanna fuck you like an animal."  He's been airing that song in concert these days, and admits he hasn't quite thought through the long-term implications. "When I was 25, people used to say to me that having kids would change you, and I'd roll my eyes," says Reznor, who married singer Mariqueen Maandig in October 2009. "I don't know what it'll be like when they read old stories about my addiction or listen to the older songs. I do know that I caught myself swearing in front of them during a road-rage moment and was worried they'd parrot it back."  He shakes his head. "It's a humbling thing, having kids. One of my sons came to rehearsals, and now he says Daddy's job is 'go play loud music.'  I'm not as afraid of judgments as I used to be. I just want to do the best I can do, and not squander any more time than I already have when I was high. That's my main concern.”

That job, and Daddy's relationship to it, is very different now. While Reznor takes pains to point out that he'd only ever said that Nine Inch Nails were taking a break from touring — the band had been on the road almost constantly from 2005 to 2009 — he does admit that his attitude about the project that made him rich and famous had profoundly shifted.  "The main thing was that I didn't want to be on an endless rock-band tour with Nine Inch Nails," he says. "And I said that adamantly enough to force my hand at trying something new. It was like with getting sober: I announced to the world that I was sober so that I'd be held accountable. What I feel bad about is that this is some 'KISS Final Tour of Mid-2013' idea. I get that people might feel that way, but I've given up on trying to manage the spin on things. Nine Inch Nails felt right for me to do, and that's because it felt uncomfortable in a lot of ways. That's usually a sign for me that something might be interesting."

He last felt such seductive discomfort shortly after getting off the road in 2009, when director David Fincher approached him and Reznor collaborator Atticus Ross about scoring 2010's The Social Network. "The process of working on that was surprisingly great," Reznor says. "It was like the first Nine Inch Nails van tour — some of the most rewarding work I've ever done. At the time I'd just gotten married and was feeling like I was getting old to be touring, and I thought film-scoring could be a reinvention."  Reznor, who relocated from New Orleans to Los Angeles in 2005, won an Oscar for that moody, hypnotic Social Network score, and he and Ross worked with Fincher again on 2011's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But those fulfilling experiences, he explains, were aberrations. "Seeing more about how Hollywood operates, you recognize that making movies is an economic calculation. If, by chance, a high-quality film comes out, that's good, but it's not about executing some great vision. Working with someone as smart as David Fincher isn't normal. I love the idea of making films, and hopefully want to make one of my own someday, but it wasn't a world I wanted to spend more time in."

Wait. So what Trent Reznor really wants to do is direct?  "I'm thinking a super low-brow bro comedy," he says dryly. "I'm into nut humor."  Even while Reznor was scoring the exploits of interpersonally awkward coding moguls and Swedish cyberpunks, he never stopped making music for himself. "Trent is always experimenting in the studio," Ross says. "He doesn't make some big announcement ahead of time and say, 'This fragment will someday be a Nine Inch Nails song,' but I knew that he'd return to Nails eventually."  The more vexing question was what Nine Inch Nails should be in the second decade of the 21st century. Sober, happily married, wildly successful in his other musical pursuits — what reason did Reznor have for bringing the band back to life?  “The unglamorous story is that I owed Interscope a couple of songs for a greatest-hits package," he says bluntly. "I thought that might be a good excuse to try some new things, and 'Satellite' and 'Everything' came out. It was obvious that I would have censored myself from doing things so minimal and pop in the past. That made me think, 'Let's keep chipping away at the crack in the ice. We might fall through, but that prospect is exciting.'"

With the greatest-hits project shelved until 2014, the resulting, all-new Hesitation Marks (those two early tracks included) is both sonically singular and thematically linked to a particular scarred and multi-million-selling predecessor in the Nine Inch Nails catalog. "For some reason, when I started working more on Hesitation Marks, I started thinking back romantically about who I was when I was writing The Downward Spiral," Reznor says. "I was looking back on who I was then and who I am now and how things have turned out, for better or worse. That was the air the new record was born in. I was looking at the other side of how I was not always honest about who I was in the '90s — and I knew I wasn't being honest — and if you sprinkle those negative feelings with some drugs and alcohol, it's usually not a recipe for success."  Except that it was.  "Until the balance got thrown off," corrects Reznor, who successfully completed rehab for drug and alcohol addiction in 2001. "I'm happy with who I am now. I feel fortunate to be where I am. We tried arranging the new songs with loud guitars, and it sounded false. Instead, we approached those old emotions in new ways that are subtler, and I think just as powerful."

Adorned with art by Downward Spiral cover designer Russell Mills and heavily influenced by the spare, rhythmically complex feel of D'Angelo's Voodoo, the result is as sleek an album as Nine Inch Nails have ever made. Lead single "Came Back Haunted" squirms on the strength of a simple drum-machine pattern, scuffed synth wash, and sequenced bass; the laser-like "Everything" could be a lost Joy Division seven-inch, complete with a chorus wherein Reznor sings (not screams), "I have tried everything / I've survived everything." But instead of sounding like a furious regret, the line hits as hard-won wisdom.  "We tried not to do the classic Nine Inch Nail things on the album," says co-producer Alan Moulder, who has worked with Reznor going back to The Downward Spiral. "The old trademark with Trent was that when we got to the chorus, the songs go up a step, he sings in his highest range possible, and a million guitars come in. We tried to do the opposite on this one. The choruses actually go down; the sound is more withheld than explosive, which is a much harder thing to do."  The album is also a more insinuating, collaborative sound, a long way from the hermetic sonic phantasmagorias of 1992's landmark Broken EP or 1999's double-disc behemoth The Fragile. "In the past," says longtime NIN visual collaborator Rob Sheridan, "Trent would bring in a violin player and give him something very specific to do. This time, he'd bring in Lindsey Buckingham and say, 'Let's see what he'll come up with.' That's a radical change in approach."

For his part, Buckingham recalls there being a "great sense of calm in the studio. Trent's got this aggressive persona, but then he turns out to be this laid-back, soft-spoken guy putting things together in a very painterly way."  Reznor also enlisted former David Bowie and Talking Heads sideman Adrian Belew and D'Angelo studio bassist Pino Palladino, among others, for Hesitation Marks, and though things still aren't perfect — Belew has since bowed out of the NIN touring production, telling reporters, simply, "It didn't work" — the overall change in dynamics is still pronounced. "There's a lot less face-punching in the songs now," Reznor says. "I'm not as afraid of judgments as I used to be. I just want to do the best I can do, and not squander any more time than I already have when I was high. That's my main concern. If you don't like the music or think I should be someone I'm not, fine."  He juts his chin out defiantly. "But I'm still competitive," he says. "If I'm going to do this, I want to win."

In the time between 2007's Year Zero (released on Interscope) and Hesitation Marks (released on Columbia), Trent Reznor hocked a lot of thick loogies in the direction of major labels. Publicly and repeatedly, he chided them for sticking their collective heads in the sand with regards to file-sharing. He thought that the suits were more inclined to sue fans than serve them. So he left.  "At Interscope, it felt like we were one of 50 bands, and we didn't sell as much as Eminem, so no one cared about us," Reznor says, having finished the coffee and moved on to the Diet Coke. "Combine that with unquestionably wrong move after wrong move in terms of the response to new technologies — I just felt like I could figure things out better than they could."  He was correct, up to a point. 2008's raw, jittery The Slip, offered for free on the NIN website, was downloaded 2.4 million times; a lavish, pricey physical package sold in the neighborhood of 250,000 copies. (That same year, he also offered the instrumental ambient collection Ghosts under his own Null Corporation umbrella.)  "Being in control of your own destiny was great," he says of the decision to go indie. "It felt good to have my own neck on the line. But you spend a lot of time figuring out who the influential blogger at some radio station is. Market research is not a sexy thing to think about. More than that, when you're self-releasing, you have this walled garden of people that are interested in what you do, and to everyone else you're invisible."

Meanwhile, as he sought to extend the boundaries of his fan base, he was reconsidering his role as a public figure.  "I was excited about Twitter when we went out on our own because it felt like the most direct way to penetrate people's attention," says Reznor, an early and eager adopter of the platform, who in his mid-aughts guise was quick to volley with fans and fire shots at fellow musicians. "I also got a charge out of people realizing that I wasn't a recluse sleeping in a coffin. But in hindsight, my experimenting with Twitter was a mistake. Oversharing feels vulgar to me now. I know we've been fooled into thinking it's okay to show dick pics and that the Kardashians' behavior is normal, but it's not. I've tuned out in the last couple years. Everybody's got a fucking opinion. It takes courage to put something out creatively into the world, and then to see it get trampled on by cunts? It's destructive."  There's another factor to Reznor's more cautious approach to social media: "I've had the experience over the last few years of liking bands, and then checking what they're up to on Tumblr or something, and immediately realizing, 'This is you?' Fuck.' I don't want my personality to get in the way of what I'm trying to do musically."

Once Reznor had sifted through the results of his various outreach trials, he decided he needed a hand. In November 2012, Columbia released An omen EP_ by How to Destroy Angels, his ambient-pop project with Maandig and Ross; that was followed up with a full-length, Welcome oblivion, earlier this year. "It was no meddling, a modest advance, we split any profits," he says. "If there used to be 100 people at a major working on a record, now there are 18, but they're the good ones. There's a lean, mean hunger. I'm not trying to be a major-label apologist, I'm just telling you what I saw. Instead of me and Rob Sheridan trying to figure things out, there's an extra 15 people and the sense that someone in France was aware of what we were doing — instead of us hoping we'd remembered that France existed. So when a Nine Inch Nails album was in the works, and the mission was to try to make as many people aware of it as we can, we thought, 'Let's try it. Let's see what happens.'" (Still, he adds that NIN's deal with Columbia is "not long-term.")

But given Reznor's willingness to call bullshit on the corporate overlords, was there any hesitance from said overlords to get into the Nine Inch Nails business?  "With an artist like Trent, you have to trust that they're making the decisions they want to make," says Columbia Records Chairman Rob Stringer. "He's been very smart about building up the demand for Nine Inch Nails by working on so many different things over the last few years — and the new record is so strong — that it feels like an opportunity for us to work with somebody who has an effect on pop culture. There was no trepidation on our part."  So far, so good. "Nine Inch Nails feels bigger than it ever has," says a bemused Reznor. "Is it because we're on Columbia? Is it scarcity? I don't know, but it doesn't feel bigger in the sense that we've desperately adopted some new clothing style. It feels organic, and it feels good not to be worrying about whether or not we shipped vinyl to the cool record store in Prague. I know that what we're doing flies in the face of the Kickstarter Amanda-Palmer-Start-a-Revolution thing, which is fine for her, but I'm not super-comfortable with the idea of Ziggy Stardust shaking his cup for scraps. I'm not saying offering things for free or pay-what-you-can is wrong. I'm saying my personal feeling is that my album's not a dime. It's not a buck. I made it as well as I could, and it costs 10 bucks, or go fuck yourself."

There's been a lot of change in the life of Nine Inch Nails, but also some constants. Twenty years and hundreds of performances down a crooked road, Trent Reznor still often chooses to say goodbye to his crowds with "Hurt," the last track on The Downward Spiral, and the song that in its lean, confessional intensity is Hesitation Marks' most direct emotional precursor.  "When I was younger, to hear people singing that song, or any song, back to me? Holy shit, what a great feeling," says Reznor, leaning forward. "Over time, that feeling corrupted me. I didn't feel interesting enough to deserve it, and then I reinvented myself as a caricature. Money creeps in, people want to sleep with you, you distort. Add alcohol and drugs, and things go south fast. A song like 'Hurt' is reinterpreted by who I am now — and I like that person a lot more.  "The person you're talking to now is the real me — the smart, together me from high school," Reznor continues. "I feel so much younger than I am. I wish I could change some things about the path it took to get here, but I feel lucky that I'm not as caught up in anger as I was."  Then a sinister glimmer flashes across his hazel eyes, and Trent Reznor does what he's always done. "Believe me," he says, offering that old unsettling reassurance. "There's still no shortage of things that piss me off."

 

http://www.spin.com/featured/trent-reznor-upward-spiral-nine-inch-nails-spin-cover-september-2013/?utm_source=em&utm_medium=weeklynl&utm_campaign=082713&utm_content=coverstory


Trent Reznor Brutally Dismisses Smart-Ass Redditor in How to Destroy Angels AMA

(By Chris Martins, Spin.com, 05 March 2013)

Trent Reznor's How to Destroy Angels released their debut album Welcome Oblivion today and, as a treat for fans, hopped onto Reddit to host an AMA ("ask me anything"). With recently announced tours on the horizon for both HTDA and the recently reformed Nine Inch Nails — plus that "Head Like a Hole" Carly Rae Jepsen mashup making the rounds — there was plenty to talk about. That said, it was a fairly boring talk, with one glaring exception.  One "fan" took the opportunity to call Reznor out for a handful of things: "As millionaires, why did you sign up with a record label to promote your new album? ... I don't buy the 'get it to as many people as possible' excuse ... especially when Trent conveniently places a spotlight on his former cash cow a few days before your band releases this new album. Good marketing, Gene Sim-, er, Trent Reznor. When can I get my NIN toothpaste?"

But stow your "oooohs" until you read Reznor's argument-ending response: "[Trent] Sorry, the wifi on our yacht is having issues, we can't get your full question to load. Try sending me an email at gofuckyourself@youcunt.com." Burn. "How to Destroy Assholes," quipped one Redditor. Another pointed out that the user had a valid question, even if it was dripping with utter insult.  Another highlight came in Reznor's response to a question about Dave Grohl's Sound City and the issue of people trumpeting (no pun) traditional instruments over computers: "I don't really care if you can play an instrument or not. I don't think that's a mandatory skill required to make music that can connect with people. I do think computers have made it easy to make lazy music that sounds nice. I find a fair amount of what's championed today feels to me like it falls in that category - much more fashion than substance. There's also a lot of current music I think is great ... The Knife is a good example."

Reznor also explained that his view on A-list team-ups has evolved through the years: "Working with David Fincher [The Social Network, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo] taught me a lot about collaboration, and HTDA allowed me to work in a band environment that I found very rewarding. I don't know that I was ever comfortable enough with myself earlier in my life to be able to open up and collaborate. Regarding NIN, what's interesting to me about re-assembling it is trying some new things out with a different type of lineup. We're not deep into NIN rehearsals yet, but the idea is exciting."

Beyond that, Rob Sheridan spoke on his plans for HTDA visuals on the road: "Do not go in expecting [NIN's] Lights in the Sky, because this is a very very different presentation from NIN. This is going to be more of a statement, more of an audio/visual installation than a rock concert. Probably a lot of people aren't going to 'get' it, but hopefully they'll walk away saying, 'I'm not sure what the hell I just watched, but it was pretty cool.'"  Oh, and Mariqueen Maandig acknowledged the "Call Me Maybe" mashup: "Honestly I haven't even heard it yet. But I'll make that priority #586 for today." We can see why she and Reznor get along.

 

Nine Inch Nails Announce Tour With Formidable New Lineup

(By Marc Hogan, Spin.com, 25 February 2013)

After years of hints, clues, and teases, Trent Reznor is reviving Nine Inch Nails, who performed their last live shows in 2009. The trailblazing band will start playing shows with a new lineup this summer, with a U.S. arena tour to follow this fall and global dates on the way into 2014, Reznor said in a statement to Pitchfork.  Along with Reznor, the new lineup includes Jane's Addiction's Eric Avery, King Crimson's Adrian Belew, and Josh Eustis, of the sorely missed Chicago production duo Telefon Tel Aviv.  Past NIN cohorts Alessandro Cortini and Ilan Rubin are also on board.

The relaunch isn't totally unexpected. Late last year, the New Yorker reported NIN would release a greatest-hits collection sometime in 2014. The compilation was to include two new songs by Reznor, who reportedly planned to write music for a new record. A tour coinciding with those plans only makes sense, but what's shocking is that this is finally, actually happening. Hold off on those travel plans, though: No information about dates or venues is available yet.  NIN's touring plans also help to explain the abbreviated concert schedule for Reznor's How to Destroy Angels project. His band with wife Mariqueen Maandig and previous collaborators Rob Sheridan and Atticus Ross recently added only 11 dates to a docket that also includes sets at Coachella. Welcome Oblivion, How to Destroy Angels' debut full-length, is due out on March 5 via Columbia Records.  Check out Reznor's full note below.

NOTE FROM TRENT:

Nine Inch Nails are touring this year.

I was working with Adrian Belew on some musical ideas, which led to some discussion on performing, which led to some beard-scratching, which (many steps later) led to the decision to re-think the idea of what Nine Inch Nails could be, and the idea of playing a show. Calls were made to some friends, lots of new ideas were discussed, and a show was booked - which led to another, which somehow led to a lot of shows.  The band is reinventing itself from scratch and will be comprised of Eric Avery, Adrian Belew, Alessandro Cortini, Josh Eustis, Ilan Rubin, and me. The first shows will begin this summer, followed by a full-on arena tour of the US this fall, and lots of other dates worldwide to follow through 2014.  Lots of details and dates to come. See you soon.

TR

http://www.spin.com/#articles/nine-inch-nails-trent-reznor-tour-lineup-2013-2014

 

Nine Inch Nails Meet Carly Rae Jepsen In Insane Mashup 'Call Me A Hole'

(By Marc Hogan, Spin.com, March 5 2013)

Just when you thought the Internet had squeezed all life out of "Call Me Maybe," along comes the Internet to perform CPR. As the Verge points out, a mashup of Nine Inch Nails' 1989 industrial-rock landmark "Head Like a Hole" and Carly Rae Jepsen's endlessly memeable 2012 hit now exists. It's the product of a Reddit user's humble request, and, despite basically just setting Trent Reznor's anguished vocals over Jepsen's perky instrumentals, it's strangely seamless. "Call Me Maybe (Sekuoia LOL Mix)," meet something possibly even catchier. Just in time for the revivified Nine Inch Nails' summer festival dates.

 

http://www.spin.com/#articles/nine-inch-nails-carly-rae-jepsen-call-me-a-hole-mashup-stream

An Oscar Voter's Brutally Honest Ballot

(As told to Scott Feinberg, Hollywood Reporter, 20 February 2013)

 One director shares his choices, calling "Argo" a "whole lot of nothing," saying "Django Unchained" is "Tarantino masturbating" and passing on "Amour" because "there's only so much diaper-changing I can tolerate."

One of the 371 members of the Academy’s directors branch recently invited me over to his office to listen in as he openly deliberated about how to fill out his final ballot for the 85th Oscars. As you can tell from his remarks -- highlights of which have been reprinted below, category-by-category -- he has seen virtually all of the contenders and has very strong but carefully considered opinions about them. He opted to vote online rather than via paper ballot -- “because I want to feel young again,” he said with a chuckle -- and did not experience any issues with the voting system. His main issue, in fact, is with the studios that have inundated him with promotional swag, most of which he doesn’t want. “I’ve gotten books, cookbooks and just about everything short of Lincoln condoms,” he cracked. “It’s ridiculous.” Eventually, we got down to business, and, in no particular order, touched upon all 24 Oscar categories.

 

BEST SOUND MIXING

“This is the award for sound that is mixed on the set on the day. I’m going to dismiss Life of Pi because it seems like very much of a postproduction movie. And I’m going to vote for Les Miserables because they recorded the singing for live on the set and every quaver had to be caught. They had to be absolutely perfect, and they were.”
Vote: Les Miserables
 

BEST SOUND EDITING

“This is more about sound effects done in post. I’m going to dismiss Argo, Django and Life of Pi because I don’t think their post sound effects were terribly interesting or original. Zero Dark Thirty? I imagine that a great deal of the raid was done with sound effects editing. But I’m gonna go with Skyfall. The sound of that movie was absolutely extraordinary -- in particular, when the train comes colliding into the station.”
Vote: Skyfall
 

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

“I did not see all of the nominees, but with something like visual effects you can see enough of a film, in many cases, to make an informed decision. The Hobbit lost me with the 48 frames-per-second; I think it’s failed experiment -- noble, but failed. The Avengers and Prometheus are the same old thing. Snow White and the Huntsman lost me when they went into the woods. But Life of Pi is pretty extraordinary—the visuals are as magnificent as anything I’ve seen in a movie in a very long time. I was also very impressed that the tiger is so realistic and so unsentimental.”
Vote: Life of Pi
 

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN

“In general, I object to movies that primarily feature CGI production design, like The Hobbit and Life of Pi. Les Miserables? One of its weakest things was its production design -- for example, in the beginning of the movie, that huge boat looked ridiculously fake. So that leaves Anna Karenina, which is a movie I loathed, and Lincoln. I’m not gonna vote for Lincoln for best picture, but I have a lot of personal respect for Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy and I want to help the film, so when I can throw it a vote, like here, I will.”
Vote: Lincoln
 

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

“This is No-Brainer City: ‘Skyfall’ is one of the best songs that has ever been in the best song category and Adele is f---ing brilliant. Plus I think it’s about time that a James Bond song won best song. In a way, this is my F-you for not giving it to ‘Live and Let Die’ back in 1973. I will say that ‘Before My Time,’ which is sung by Scarlett Johansson, is pretty good. ‘Pi’s Lullaby’ I couldn’t remember if my life was on the line. ‘Everybody Needs a Best Friend’ is a simple song. And ‘Suddenly’ from Les Miserables is a very boring song and an absolutely blatant attempt to win a best song Oscar; that upsets me. If ‘Skyfall’ does not win I will fillet my next-door neighbor’s dog.”
Vote: “Skyfall” (Skyfall)
 

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

“Life of Pi is an absolutely perfect score. [Lincoln composer] John Williams has enough f---ing Oscars, and I really feel that the score was a weak part of Lincoln and just self-plagiarism for Williams. Thomas Newman should have won the Oscar a couple of times, but I just didn’t see anything particularly new or interesting in the music of Skyfall.”
Vote: Life of Pi
 

BEST MAKEUP & HAIRSTYLING

“I don’t think it’s a very impressive category this year. They should have nominated Lincoln because of how much they made Daniel Day-Lewis look like Lincoln. In Hitchcock Anthony Hopkins just looked like a man in a fat-suit—I didn’t really buy it. The Hobbit? You know, whatever—it’s what they do every time. So I guess I’m going to vote for Les Miserables here, only because of how well they aged Hugh Jackman. And I think they did a good job beating the shit out of Anne Hathaway, as well.”
Vote: Les Miserables
 

BEST FILM EDITING

“I think one of the worst things about Silver Linings Playbook was its editing; there was a lot of mismatching. Lincoln? There really isn’t much editing to speak of. Life of Pi is interesting because it was mostly computer-generated, I think there were not that many decisions to be made with editing, as opposed to when you get a shitload of stuff and have to figure out what you’re going to use. Argo had some pretty good editing, especially that sequence at the end when they’re making their escape. But the undeniable winner is Zero Dark Thirty, which must have had a massive amount of footage to boil down and made that raid at the end very understandable.”
Vote: Zero Dark Thirty
 

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

“It’s a very good group; I saw them all. The most powerful might be The Gatekeepers, so that could win. But, in order to win this Oscar, you usually have to make a film that makes people feel absolutely great or makes people feel like they want to slit their wrists; something that’s jovial or something that’s important. I think that Searching for Sugar Man is going to win, and I’m going to vote for it because I just felt like a million bucks after watching it -- and I bought Rodriguez’s album.”
Vote: Searching for Sugar Man
 

BEST SHORT (ANIMATED)

[Had not seen any of the films, but had heard good things about Paperman so he voted for it.]
Vote: Paperman
 

BEST SHORT (DOCUMENTARY)

[Had not seen any of the films and knew nothing about any of them, so he declined to vote.]
Vote: [Abstained]
 

BEST SHORT (LIVE ACTION)

“Curfew is the least depressing of five films guaranteed to prevent you from getting laid, as I personally learned.”
Vote: Curfew
 

BEST DIRECTING

I would have voted for Bigelow -- I certainly nominated her and Affleck. Silver Linings is a screenplay;  the direction is not particularly important -- although it took David O. Russell to figure out that Bradley Cooper is a great actor. Life of Pi is very well-directed and extremely well-thought-out, but I was put off by the religious message at the end. Beasts? I know many people loved it, but I got seasick and found it to be almost impossibly boring. Amour is purely a performance piece; besides, Michael Haneke has pissed me off in the past because he’s made movies that are so misanthropic. He just hates human beings, and I happen to be a human being and don’t like being shit on. That leaves Lincoln, which I don’t feel is the best-directed film of the year -- there’s nothing innovative about it -- but I’m swept away with the gravity of the subject matter, with the respect that Spielberg showed to it and with him guiding Day-Lewis in a direction different than we’d normally associated with Lincoln. Plus, Spielberg deserves an Oscar every 10 years or so out of respect for what he does for the industry.
Vote: Lincoln
 

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

“This always goes to the nominee with the puffiest dresses. Just once I’d like to see a more modern film put into this category. Mirror Mirror is out for me. Lincoln is out for me. I just don’t want to support Anna Karenina, even though it’s probably going to win because it’s exactly the kind of movie that does win this award; people who haven’t even seen the film are going to vote for it because it just has that smell. But I’m gonna go for Snow White because you had the knights in the shining armor and then you had the more mythical costumes and on and on. I think it was just a little bit more inventive than the others.”
Vote: Snow White and the Huntsman

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

“I liked Life of Pi, but I’m suspect of any nominee that used a lot of CGI, since you can manipulate the photography so much. Lincoln was way too milky for me; I have that problem with almost everything Janusz Kaminski does. The Anna Karenina cinematography was totally unimpressive. Django Unchained was Robert Richardson, and he, in general, does far too much top-lighting for me. I’m voting for Skyfall because I want Roger Deakins to win an Oscar. Now, I’m a person who knows that Roger Deakins shot Skyfall, but a lot of people in the Academy will have no clue who did because they don’t tell you on the ballot; in fact, they won’t vote for it because it’s a James Bond film -- you know, ‘How can you give James Bond an Oscar?’ But they should go back and rewatch that opening shot where Bond is approaching the camera, and he’s out-of-focus and he slams into focus in a way that I’ve never seen done before. I also really love the way that Deakins plays with dark and light in the film.”
Vote: Skyfall
 

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

“It’s a tough category because everything is mediocre. I’m definitely not voting for The Pirates. I’m not voting for Frankenweenie. Brave was unimpressive. So I guess it’s between ParaNorman and Wreck-It Ralph. So… [At this time he assigned the screen side of his iPhone to the former and the back side of it to the latter, and spun it on his desk.]
Vote: Wreck-It Ralph
 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

“It’s a very interesting category.  Jacki Weaver? I don’t even know why she’s there, and she knocked out Ann Dowd, who probably deserved that spot for Compliance. Helen Hunt is really a lead actress. Sally Field is undeserving in this category -- I didn’t find a single moment in the film where I thought she did anything extraordinary; she’s playing an annoying character, and she is rather annoying, plus she’s about 20 years too old for the role. Amy Adams is going to be nominated 20 more times, but this one’s a total throwaway role. Which leaves Anne Hathaway, who’s going to win because she makes you cry and because I find her charming. Sometimes it’s one scene that wins it for you. Not just anybody can come in and kill one song; there are many songs that Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe should have killed, and, in fact, they killed them literally.”
Vote: Anne Hathaway (Les Miserables)
 

BEST ACTRESS

“For the first hour of The Impossible, you can’t imagine how Naomi Watts cannot win, but her character basically becomes a person who is exclusively struggling and who disappears for large chunks of the film, so I can’t vote for her. I also don’t vote for anyone whose name I can’t pronounce. Quvez---? Quzen---? Quyzenay? Her parents really put her in a hole by giving her that name -- Alphabet Wallis. The truth is, it’s a very sweet but immature performance from a 9-year-old. I’ve directed children. They probably did a thousand takes and put the best ones together. Jennifer Lawrence I was on the fence about, but she lost me with that Saturday Night Live bit; I thought it was mean-spirited and shows a lack of maturity on her part. So, for me, it’s between Jessica Chastain and Emmanuelle Riva. I didn’t like Amour, but I think Riva was extraordinary in it. Chastain was just fantastic in Zero Dark Thirty -- she is the major star of tomorrow and probably has another 10 Oscar nominations in her future. Meanwhile, Emmanuelle Riva may not even live through Oscar night, so …”
Vote: Emmanuelle Riva (Amour)
 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

“I rule out Christoph Waltz because this is a fake nomination — he’s a co-lead with Jamie Foxx, and it’s unfair for the others to compete with that. Also, much of his performance is just like in Inglourious Basterds. Robert De Niro was just Robert De Niro; yes, he had one crying scene, but crying is not enough. Alan Arkin in Argo? I’m shocked he’s even nominated. Tommy Lee Jones has been such a bitter guy -- all that scowling at the Golden Globes? I’m telling you, people don’t like the guy. So I turn to Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was sublime in The Master. It’s a very original performance. What’s interesting about it is you don’t know where the character is coming from; you sort of assume he’s insincere, but sometimes he comes across as extremely sincere. Now, you could argue that it’s also a lead, but if you go back and take out a stopwatch, you’ll realize that it really is Joaquin Phoenix’s movie.”
Vote: Philip Seymour Hoffman (The Master)
 

BEST ACTOR

“I would be surprised if Daniel Day-Lewis doesn’t get 80 percent of the vote -- people like and respect him and also the character. I’ll bet you that none of the other nominated guys have even written a speech. I, too, thought he was very good, but basically it was a lot of soliloquies, you know, so I didn’t see that much range from him. For Bradley Cooper, the nomination is his award. Hugh Jackman did a terrible job singing many of the songs in Les Mis -- I think the live singing, in many cases, actually hurt the movie because the singing just isn’t as good as it could be. Denzel Washington plays a drunk and an addict, which is very difficult to do, and it’s a brilliant performance, but so much of it goes on the natural fumes of Denzel, and he’s already won two Academy Awards. So I’m gonna vote for Joaquin Phoenix, who gives a performance for the ages. So much went into that performance. He created a character as distinct as Daniel Plainview [Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood], from always hunching and putting his right hand on his hip to crying as he’s being audited.”
Vote: Joaquin Phoenix (The Master)
 

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

“It’s a rather strong category, but I’m partial to Life of Pi because we all thought that it was an unfilmable book, and yet David Magee came up with a way to structure it that was faithful to the book but also cinematic. Lincoln was a little too much of a history lesson. Plus, I thought the opening scene with the black soldier and the scene featuring Tommy Lee Jones’ character and his maid were both very contrived, and that the ending, as is so often the case in Spielberg’s movies, was overkill. Silver Linings is a pretty good screenplay, but I wasn’t wowed by it. Argo is a whole lot of nothing; it’s a very engaging story but with nothing particularly clever in the writing. And I didn’t understand what was going on in Beasts of the Southern Wild; up until this very second I didn’t even realize it was an adapted screenplay.”
Vote: Life of Pi
 

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

“Amour is immediately disqualified—it’s just a woman dying, and there’s no real story, and it made me feel like shit. There’s only so much diaper-changing that I can tolerate. Django? If Tarantino had never made a film and this was his first screenplay, I might consider voting for him, but he’s made the same movie eight times. Moonrise Kingdom? It’s a personal thing, but I don’t like this guy’s movies. Flight offers a look at addiction unlike any we’ve seen. But Mark Boal’s Zero Dark Thirty script is even more amazing, with very good moments and great tension. Also, this whole torture thing is nonsense. Knowing that it’s not gonna win best picture, part of me just wants to try to push through an award for it as an ‘I’m sorry.’ ”
Vote: Zero Dark Thirty
 

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

“I’ve seen all of the nominees at official Academy screenings held over the past few weeks. You go into that theater, you sit there, you look around, and you just hope that there’s an ambulance outside because a lot of the members in attendance must have aged out of AARP at this point. I really wonder if these people are going to vote for Amour, because they’re really looking at themselves and they’ve gotta be saying, ‘This is what’s in my future? This is f---ing depressing.’ It’s depressing for people who are dying and for people who have to take care of people who are dying. It’s like, who needs that shit? I personally didn’t care for it. A Royal Affair is the kind of film that bores me; I fell asleep as I was watching it. No is a very good film, but it’s shot in a very weird way. War Witch is a really great film, but it’s an absolute f---ing bummer, and when you have children in jeopardy, people check out. That leaves Kon-Tiki, which has a very weird beginning but is very moving by the end; when they showed the photos of the real-life people at the end, my eyes were welling up. There is a tendency among voters in this category to vote for something that uplifts or energizes them, and this certainly does that.”
Vote: Kon-Tiki (Norway)

BEST PICTURE

“This is a preferential system. I’m putting Amour at No. 9 because I’m just pissed off at that film. Beasts of the Southern Wild is a movie that I just didn’t understand, so that’s my No. 8. Les Miserables goes in seventh place — it’s not just the most disappointing film of the year but the most disappointing film in many years. Above that I’m putting Silver Linings Playbook, which is just a “blah” film. Django Unchained will go into my fifth slot — it’s a fun movie, but it’s basically just Quentin Tarantino masturbating for almost three hours. Next up is Life of Pi because of how unique it is and for holding my attention up until its irritating ending. Argo is gonna go in third place, but I don’t want it to win because I don’t think it deserves to win and am annoyed that it is on track to win for the wrong reasons. Actually, come to think of it, do we have to put a film in every slot? Because what I want is for my best picture choice to have the best possible shot, so why even give any support to the others? [He has his assistant call the Oscar voting helpline, finds out that voters can leave slots blank and promptly removes all of the aforementioned selections.] I’m basically OK with one of two films winning. Lincoln is going in my second slot; it’s a bore, but it’s Spielberg, it’s well-meaning, and it’s important. Zero Dark Thirty is my No 1.”
Vote: (1) Zero Dark Thirty, (2) Lincoln, (3) [blank], (4) [blank], (5) [blank], (6) [blank], (7) [blank], (8) [blank], (9) [blank]

 

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/oscar-voters-brutally-honest-ballot-422546

A Suburban Wasteland In Virginia Gets A Modern Urban Feel

(By Alison M. Rice, New York Times, 18 December 2012)

To see Merrifield, Virginia today, with its sleek white Target, its narrow 1920s-style streetscape of specialty food shops along Glass Alley and the rest of the $542 million mixed-use Mosaic District is to nearly forget this unincorporated area’s former life as an uninviting industrial suburban crossroads.  But Gerald E. Connolly has not forgotten. Mr. Connolly, who is a second-term member of the United States House of Representatives and a former local official for this corner of Northern Virginia, is familiar with Merrifield’s past and present. He remembers thinking to himself, “What a waste of land,” after being elected in 1995 to the Fairfax County board of supervisors. “We have this aging movie theater that’s surrounded by acres of surface parking,” Mr. Connolly said.

Devising a solution required some imagination. When Mr. Connolly and others first began talking about redeveloping Merrifield, the area was known for its clogged traffic, fast-food restaurants, a dilapidated auto repair shop with quirky decorations, an industrial equipment rental business, a multiscreen movie theater and a huge regional post office.  That is slowly starting to change. The auto body shop and fast-food restaurants have vanished, swept away into a long-anticipated $120 million road project designed to smooth the car-choked intersection at Lee Highway and Gallows Road, used by 80,000 vehicles a day. The Lee Highway Multiplex, which was the site of a gang-related incident in 2005, is now gone, its land sold after its owner, National Amusements, scrambled to respond to a debt crisis with its bankers.

A street grid populated with more modern buildings is beginning to emerge in the Mosaic District, which is the core of the new town center plan, and beyond. “There’s more to be done, but you can see the final result in your mind’s eye without too much effort,” Mr. Connolly said.  The company behind the latest stage in Merrifield’s evolution is Edens, a private retail developer based in Columbia, S.C., that owns more than 130 shopping centers. “This was the right project, in the right place, at the right time, by the right developer,” said Barbara Byron, director of Fairfax County’s Office of Community Revitalization. “The vision that they presented was exactly what the county was looking for as the Merrifield Town Center.”  Edens found Merrifield, which is about 15 miles from Washington, enticing. “There are very few sites left in the country that are undeveloped and that have the density and strength of a permanent and daytime consumer base within a 10-minute drive time,” said Jodie W. McLean, the president and chief investment officer for Edens, who found the local market statistics — 10 million square feet of office space within a mile and an average household income of $173,338 within a five-mile radius — irresistible.

The result was the 31-acre Mosaic District, which opened this fall with shops and restaurants, an Angelika Film Center, a 150-room Hyatt House hotel, and 73,000 square feet of office space. While much of the retail has been leased, the offices are still awaiting the first tenants. Named Mosaic to refer to the many different Northern Virginia neighborhoods that encircle Merrifield, the project is divided into four geographic districts: fashion and retail; film and dining; market, which includes specialty food shops; and residential.   Eventually, the LEED-certified development will include a total of 500,000 square feet of retail and 1,000 residential units. The housing will be built by rental apartment developers AvalonBay and Mill Creek Residential, with townhouses for sale built by the home builder EYA of Bethesda, Md. A handful of the residences will be designated as affordable housing for qualified applicants.  All those components add up to the largest development that Edens has ever done. “We spent a long time understanding the consumer,” said Ms. McLean, whose team drew up profiles of what they see as crucial Mosaic District visitors, from the baby boomer mom whose youngest child is leaving for college soon to young, single women who love to shop. Based on that research, Edens decided that the district would need to become a destination that offered convenience and a unique consumer experience.  So Edens built a one-acre park and erected a supersize outdoor movie screen overlooking the park for public events to serve as a gathering place for the surrounding community.

To be more accessible to drivers than nearby Tysons Corner Center, a large regional mall with its own traffic problems, Edens specifically designed the district’s parking for speedy entry and exit.  And to provide an experience, not just transactions, to shoppers who always have the Internet for low prices and fast shipping, Edens carefully vetted restaurants and retailers to find distinctive shops and restaurants. “Consumers want to spend time where it feels unique and special,” said Ms. McLean, whose firm wants the district to become at least a twice-weekly visit for its core customers.  As a result, the mix of retail and restaurant tenants is an untraditional combination of national retailers like Anthropologie and tiny local shops like the upscale Dawn Price Baby store and Artisan Confections, a chocolatier. But to capture them, Edens had to overcome the area’s formerly downscale image and lack of identity.  “When Mosaic approached us, we had just begun to think about opening a second store,” said Cary Kelly, owner of Ah Love Oil & Vinegar, which sells more than 30 different varieties of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. “I thought, ‘Merrifield? Where is that?’ But we were really impressed by the product mix, the intentional aspect of it, and the big emphasis on local businesses.”

In the Mosaic District, Edens grouped its tenants by type, clustering specialty grocers such as MOM’s Organic Market close to a butcher, fish market and wine shop, for example. “Mixed use has relied on food of all kinds as its primary anchor, from Whole Foods to Harris Teeter and restaurants of all types,” said Maureen McAvey, a retail specialist with the Urban Land Institute in Washington. “As bookstores closed, food has become even more important” to retail development.  As the district comes together, though, one piece remains stubbornly hard to fit: walkability. Intended as a pedestrian-friendly town center and less than a mile from a Metro station, Mosaic is still best reached for many visitors by car or bus, rather than on foot, because of traffic on nearby roads.  “You have to retrofit what you already have, and Gallows Road and Lee Highway were already in place,” said Linda Q. Smyth, who represents Merrifield on the county’s board of supervisors. She remembered just how insufficient Merrifield’s infrastructure used to be, recalling that “we had pieces of street that faded into nothing.”

Such a mixed bag of infrastructure takes time to convert into a walkable neighborhood. Elected officials say recent road improvements intended to divert traffic away from known Merrifield bottlenecks should help. So should many of the residential projects under construction in the area, which will expand the sidewalk network and create the new street grid, they said.  But some people are not interested in waiting to see what happens. At EYA, sales are running ahead of projections. The builder had expected to sell 48 of its town homes in the district in 2012, but as of mid-December, the builder had already sold 71, at prices starting in the $600,000s. “They want walkable living and there’s some sense of being an urban pioneer,” Preston Innerst, EYA’s vice president of sales and marketing, said of the Mosaic District buyers. “They see a lot of upside potential, and they like the feeling of being in on the ground floor before it really takes off.”

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/realestate/commercial/a-suburban-wasteland-in-virginia-gets-a-modern-urban-feel.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

By Any Measure, The Jobs Disaster Continues

(By Mortimer Zuckerman, Wall Street Journal, 15 February 2013)

Jobs! President Obama has set a record. In his speech to Congress on Tuesday, he uttered the word "jobs" more than in any of his previous four State of the Union addresses. His 45 mentions were more than double the references to any of the other policy ambitions encapsulated in his speech by such words as health, education, immigration, guns, deficit, debt, energy, climate, economy, Afghanistan, wage, spend or tax (the runner-up).  If only the president's record on unemployment were as good.

The country isn't confronted daily by scenes of despair like they were in the 1930s, the jobless however are still there.  After four years America remains in a jobs depression as great as the Great Depression. But the crisis isn't seen in that light because the country isn't confronted daily by scenes of despair like the 1930s photographs of bread lines and soup kitchens and thousands of men (very few women then) waiting all day outside a factory in a forlorn quest for work.  But the jobless are still in the millions across the land, little changed in their total since the 1930s: 12.3 million today officially fully unemployed compared with 12.8 million in 1933 at the depth of the Depression.  Yes, the U.S. population is much larger now, but 12 million out of work still means 12 million lives devastated. And that number masks the true vastness of the modern disaster.

The jobless today are much less visible than they were in the 1930s because relief is organized differently. Today in the "recovery," the millions are being assisted, out of sight, by government checks, unemployment checks, Social Security disability checks and food stamps.   More than 48 million Americans are in the food-stamp program—an almost incredible record. That is 15% of the total population compared with the 7.9% participation in food stamps from 1970-2000. Then there are the more than 11 million Americans who are collecting Social Security checks to compensate for disability, also a record. Half have signed on since President Obama came to office. In 1992, there was one person on disability for every 35 workers; today it is one for every 16.  Such an increase is simply impossible to connect to direct disability experienced during employment, for it is inconceivable that work in America has become so dangerous. For many, this disability program has become another form of unemployment compensation, only this time without end.

But the predicament of our times is worse than that, worse in its way than the 1930s figures might suggest. Employers are either shortening the workweek or asking employees to take unpaid leave in unprecedented numbers. Neither those on disability nor those on leave are included in the unemployment numbers.  The U.S. labor market, which peaked in November 2007 when there were 139,143,000 jobs, now encompasses only 132,705,000 workers, a drop of 6.4 million jobs from the peak. The only work that has increased is part-time, and that is because it allows employers to reduce costs through a diminished benefit package or none at all.

The broadest measure of unemployment today is approximately 14.5%, way above the 7.9% headline number. The 14.5% reflects the unemployed and three other categories: the more than eight million people who are employed part-time for economic reasons (because their hours have been cut back or because they are unable to find a full-time job), the 10 million who have stopped looking for work, and those who are "marginally attached" to the workforce.  The labor-force participation rate has dropped to the lowest level since 1981. It reflects discouraged workers who have dropped out of the labor force. If it were not for the dropouts, the formally announced unemployment rate would be around 9.8%, not the headline 7.9%.

Sometimes the employment numbers that are announced are simply not understood. January was supposed to have seen 157,000 jobs created. The news provoked relief and even enthusiasm in some quarters. But the supposed hiring was based on seasonally adjusted numbers—numbers adjusted to reflect regularly occurring shifts in employment, such as increased hiring of farm workers during crop harvests or retail employees after Thanksgiving. The real, unadjusted figures for January show that nearly 2.8 million jobs disappeared, which happened to be worse than the 2.63 million lost in January 2012. Even though the 157,000 jobs created were fewer than the 311,000 of January 2012, many commentators cheered because they don't understand the effects of seasonal adjustment.

So there is no solace in the statistics. Job seekers are only one-third as likely to find work as they were five years ago, and a record number of households have at least one member looking for a job, which affects everyone. And most of the newly available jobs don't match the pay, the hours or the benefits of the millions of positions that have vanished.  It typically takes 25 months to close the employment gap from the employment peak near the start of the downturn. Yet this time, more than 60 months after employment peaked in January 2006, nonfarm unemployment is still more than three million jobs below where it started.

The president's speech was not without sensible commitments, and the news of negotiations for a trans-Atlantic free-trade area is promising. Europe and the U.S. represent 44% of the world economy, but both have stalled. They (and the rest of the world) would benefit from freer trade. Europe and the U.S. would also benefit from common technology standards and simpler regulations. The bilateral talks have been conducted quietly and positively for some time (while the World Trade Organization talks have floundered), but it will need real executive energy to get an agreement with a real impact on jobs.  Ordinary Americans are looking for leadership and renewal. They know that a job is the most important family program, the most important economic program, and the most important national program that America could have. They also know that, by this standard, we have failed.

Mr. Zuckerman is chairman and editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323478004578303992482199574.html

The 10 Most Annoying Concert Behaviors

(By Andy Greene, Rolling Stone, January 14, 2013)

Going to rock concerts has always meant dealing with a bunch of unruly people, many of them very drunk – but it seems like lately things have been worse than ever. Attention spans are at an all-time low, and the ubiquity of smartphones has resulted in a huge percentage of the audience at any given show barely paying attention to the action onstage. Here are the 10 most annoying behaviors at rock concerts:

1. Taking pictures the entire freaking show.

I get it. You want to show all your friends on Facebook and Twitter that you saw a cool concert. Fine. Take a photo. Take five if you want! But please, don't take 77. You always manage to hold your camera right in my line of sight. You don't even look like you're enjoying the show while you're doing this. All your attention is on the photos. And you know what? Those photos are all going to look like shit. Every single one of them. You're too far away. You'll probably never even look at them. Also, you see those guys right in front of the stage with the giant cameras? They're taking great professional pictures. There's really no need for yours.

2. Checking e-mail, Facebook and Twitter every couple of minutes.

Unless you're a surgeon or a firefighter, everything can wait. Live in the moment. Enjoy the show. You paid good money to be here. You can e-mail your friends when you get home. Also, that cellphone emits a very harsh and distracting glow. For the love of God, just turn it off.

3. Incessantly talking to your friends.

You might not like whatever song is playing. You may be bored with the show in general. You may have been dragged here against your will. But you've been chattering the entire show, and I can hear every word. It's driving me crazy. Please shut up. Please. I can't tell you how many shows I attend where the two people in front of me are yelling in each others' ears the entire night. Not only is my sightline blocked when their heads come together, but I can hear them. Maybe go to a coffee shop when the show is done. Lie under an oak tree and talk until the sun comes up. I don't care. Just quiet down so I can enjoy the show.

4. Yelling out requests.

Look, I hope Morrissey plays "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" also. That would be cool – but stop screaming for it. Most of the time the set list is pre-determined, and you're screaming in my ear. They're going to play what they're going to play. Go along for the ride. And to the guy screaming for a super obscure B-side from 15 years ago? Nobody thinks you're cool.

5. Yelling out "Freebird!"

This request deserves its own subcategory of irritation. This joke has never been funny. Not once. Just stop. It was lame in 1981. Now it's just infuriating.

6. Pushing your way to the front.

If a concert is general admission, the people in front earned their spots. They got there early and laid claim to their space. The people all the way in front might have even spent all day camped out by the doors, so when the lights go off and you shove your way to the front, you're being a huge asshole. Don't do that. If you show up late and there's only room in the back, you've just gotta deal with it.

7. Getting so drunk you puke.

At pretty much any big concert, you'll see a janitor emerge after a couple of songs with a big broom and a bucket of sawdust. It means somebody puked. It's a bummer for the puker, but the people all around have to deal with the aftermath. Don't be the vomit guy. There's no worse kind of person to be at the concert.

8. Loudly complaining after the show because the band didn't play your favorite song.

Not all artists take the Rod Stewart/Billy Joel/Tom Petty approach of "nothing but the hits." Performers like Neil Young or Van Morrison are unpredictable. This is actually a good thing. Try to enjoy the show you're getting as opposed the one you wish you were seeing. Besides, haven't you heard "Brown Eyed Girl" and "Southern Man" enough?

9. Filming the entire show on your iPhone.

This distracts people even worse than taking pictures, and usually results in an equally horrid product. The sad irony is that people tend to film their favorite songs, but the smiles on their faces are gone when all their concentration goes into capturing these moments on film. Tomorrow morning, YouTube will be cluttered with crappy cellphone videos of every song from whatever show you're seeing. There's no need to add to that. You paid good money to see a show, and you're joylessly watching it through a tiny screen on your iPhone. It just doesn't make any sense.

10. Yelling "Sit down!" at people who are standing up.

This is a real problem at theater and arena shows that attract fans over the age of, say, 40. Nobody can quite agree when to stand or when to sit down. Inevitably, there are some people standing right in front of people that wish to remain seated. Between songs, someone will scream "Sit down!" The stander either obliges, or yells back something like "Go fuck yourself." The person in the seat just seethes with rage, and the tension seeps through the whole section. Often the person is standing only because someone in front of them is standing. It leads to chaos, and grumpy old people spending the entire show miserable. This has to stop. Here's a simple rule of thumb: If you can't see, stand up. It's very easy. Inversely, if everyone in front of you is seated, sit down. Go with the flow and just relax. We're all in this concert together.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-10-most-annoying-concert-behaviors-20130114#ixzz2JtCTGE85