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JEREMY & CLAIRE WEISS PHOTOGRAPHY / DAY 19
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Upcoming Events
Thursday 11/4: f \
Wine Tasting $15 ^ar Mp
taste 6 California
wines 6:00p - 8:00p. ^
Live Jazz: John Norris and
Dan Coy from 6:00 - 9:00p.
r Saturday 11/6:
Game Day Bloody Mar/s
& BBQ. Watch on HDTV.
Monday 11/8: i
Football & Poker "
Pittsburg vs. Cincinnati
& Poker at 7:30p
AMPLE PARKING AVAILABLE
Thursday 11/11:
I Cigars & Martinis
j I Taste your choice
I of cigars including
I Monticristo,Omar
^^W ) Ortez & Macanudo.
Offered from $7 to $9 each,
or paired with a premium
Ultimat martini-$15 for both.
DJ Immuztotfon 11pto dose.
U M M Jf hy won't you let me be great?"
mil# is a phrase so magical that it
W W could only have been sourced
from the perpetually indignant mind of Kanye
West. I am trying to be great, and I would be
being great, right now, if you—you—would
just get the hell out of my way. Why are you
doing this to me?
Kanye's hit-to-miss ratio is up for debate,
but about a year ago, OK Go could actually
claim the aforementioned phrase and really
own it. Up until that point, OK Go was a
genial, charming, pop-rock band from Los
Angeles that liked to dress sharply and speckle
its songs with handclaps. They'd always made
eye-catching videos, but with "Here It Goes
Again" (a jet-powered take on Billy Joel's "It's
Still Rock and Roll to Me") they raised their
personal bar. It's more widely known as the
"treadmill video," and if you need to Google
it, do so, and then you'll see why. The video
became an instant YouTube sensation, and
with good reason. It's the birth cf the sort
of idea usually left in its planning stages due
to the laziness; the video required little more
than creativity, time and effort, albeit a large
amount of all three. Cute, low-budget and
very D.I.Y., it's a surefire smile-generator. It
is great.
"Originally, eight years ago when we signed
to a major label, making a video was like it
w& for everybody," says bassist Tim Nordwind.
"They wanted us to make a commercial for our
record, and that was in the form of a video.
And when we did that, we sort of thought: if
they're going to give us V amount of dollars
to make a short film with our music as the
soundtrack, then we wanna do it. We want to
be able to have the fun of directing and com
ing up with the concept ourselves. It felt kind
of lame to farm that stuff out to other people.
It's certainly become a part of what we do as
a band. I think every band since Elvis has had
a visual component to them; it's part of the
rock and *oU culture, I think."
OK Go continued to make videos that were
a cut above the norm, arguably reaching their
apex with the Rube Goldberg-honoring "This
Too Shall Pass," but as their profile justifiably
rose, a problem arose in tandem: their record
label, EMI, decided to turn off the embed
option on their YouTube videos. It seems
that EMI would make a couple of cents off of
every video play—as long as it was directly
on YouTube. This understandably stuck in
OK Go's craw, as well as the collective craws
of their fans: it deprived the band of much-
warranted exposure, deprived the fans of the
fun of easily sharing the videos, and only for
a few meager pennies. About a year of public
legal disputes and one very public New York
Times op-ed written by lead singer Oamien
Kulash later, the band has formed its own
label, Paracadute (Italian for "parachute")
and gained full control of how its videos make
their way through the world-wide web. Finally,
no one is standing in their way of being great.
"I think the split came at a good time,"
says Nordwind. "We sort of see everything we
make as having a certain amount of value, not
only creative value but potentially financial
value as well, which was a little bit different
from the business model of the major label;
they only kind of saw value in the recording of
a song. And everything else around it pointed
to the song. Videos, concerts, collaborations,
everything you could think of was basically
looked at as marketing and promotion for
the recorded song. And we just thought that
there's a lot more value in a lot of things that
we do, and it doesn't all just point to the sin
gle recording. In fact we sort of have every
thing we make point towards everything elU
that we're making. Because we don't look at
our videos as marketing tools, we look at them
as separate art projects, basically. Same as we
look at our records as its own art project and
the way we look at collaborations we do with
technologists to make laser guitars, the list
goes on and on... So, [with Paracadute], it's
WWW.AMERICANCLASSiaATTOO.NET
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* 706-543-7628 *
NOVEMBER 3,2010 nAOWLE COM II
TA r TOO OR
Body Piercing