‘Hound of the Baskervilles’ a barking good time

Rick Cory named Boeing Engineering Student of the Year

Photo by Jason Dorfman

The gap between aeronautics and computer science is narrower than you’d think, and Postdoctoral Associate Rick Cory is proof. Though his background is in computer science and robotics, that didn’t stop him from receiving a high honor in the field of aviation. At the Farnborough Airshow in Hampshire, England, yesterday, Cory was named the 2010 Boeing Engineering Student of the Year.

A member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab’s Robot Locomotion Group, Cory received the award for his work on developing a perching airplane alongside Associate Professor Russ Tedrake. Together, they developed a glider with the ability to land on a wire like a bird.

Before beginning work on the perching-glider project in 2005, neither Tedrake nor Cory had a background in aeronautics. “We were trying to think of a project that could push the limits of robot control, and the idea came up of trying to build a robot that could fly like a bird,” Cory recalls. “For me that was a very inspiring, fantastic idea. From that point on it was literally a matter of picking up Aerodynamics 101 books and learning as much as I could.”

Tedrake and Cory drew inspiration from nature, studying the patterns and trajectories of avian flight. They found a compelling challenge in building a vehicle that, like a bird, could take advantage of available drag in order to land on a fixed target. The current iteration is a foam glider with a single motor and minimalistic control system. The design could have far-reaching applications in the development of small, highly maneuverable unmanned air vehicles.

For Cory, who will leave MIT next month to build next-generation robots for Walt Disney Imagineering, receiving the Boeing award is highly validating. “It’s certainly humbling to get recognition from one of the most recognized names in aviation,” Cory says. “[Russ and I] are both computer scientists, and I would be lying if I said there weren’t points when we wondered if anyone was going to think that this work was important. So seeing the excitement that people have about the project is amazing.”

Useful Things: Kate Nash Plays Through the Pain

Photo by Michael Young

“I hate to ask, but is anyone near the fucking bar?”

That’s Kate Nash, partway through her set at Great Scott, humbly begging her adoring audience for a drink . They were all too happy to oblige, and through the rest of the set, the PBRs and vodka-Cokes fell like manna from heaven.

If anyone ever deserved a drink (and a little manna), it was Nash that evening. The night before, she had tripped in a Toronto hotel and wound up with a sprained ankle. But a twisted joint wasn’t about to come between Nash and her performance, the second on her North American tour.

Though the London-based Nash is a pretty big deal in the US, and a pretty giant deal in the UK, this series of gigs is all about playing eensier venues—Great Scott being the eensiest of all. She was performing in support of her sophomore album, My Best Friend is You. This one is rowdier than Nash’s first, less pop and more rock. But it’s still got all her trappings—sweet hooks, take-no-prisoners lyrics, and hefty helping of post-millennial twentysomething rage.

The Great Scott show was ragey too, fueled in no small part by the fact that Nash was pretty well in the bag by night’s end (fear not, impressionable children—it was all in the name of pain management). Nash played most of the show seated at her keyboard for her ankle’s sake, which had a banner draped in front proudly proclaiming, “A cunt is a useful thing.” Otherwise, she stood on one leg with the other propped up on a stool to play guitar. Her backup band was most obliging.

The show chiefly featured songs from My Best Friend, with a few forays into classics from her debut album, Made of Bricks. And then there was the banter. She ended the talky, brilliant “Don’t You Want to Share the Guilt?” by asking the audience, “That’s my song about you. Do you like it?” She prefaced coming-out-of-the-closet anthem “I’ve Got a Secret” growling, “For all you homophobes out there, this song’s just for you.”

As the show progressed and Nash grew tipsier, the songs got louder. Nash palm-slapped the piano keys and attacked the guitar strings, and the audience didn’t mind one bit. It takes a serious trooper to play a show the night after she’s been confined to a wheelchair. But an indefatigable chick like Nash, who got her start on MySpace, grew big, stared the many-fanged fame beast in the face and didn’t ditch one iota of personal quirk, isn’t the type to let a little thing like bodily injury keep her down.

This is a piece I wrote for MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where I work by day. I interviewed Associate Professor Rob Miller and Ph.D. student Sean Chang about an ingenious programming tool they created called Sikuli. It means “the eye of god,” because it’s awesome.

————-

For CSAIL at MIT, May 10, 2010

Sikuli Rethinks Programming

Sikuli in action

For as long as there have been computers, there has been coding. And with coding comes repetition—lots of it. That’s always been the basic fact of a programmer’s existence, even as computers have become ever more friendly from a user’s perspective. That’s where Sikuli comes in. The latest from CSAIL’s User Interface Design Group, it’s a programming tool that has the ability to see like a human being. Not only does it put the graphical user interface (or GUI) in the hands of programmers, but it may one day put programming in the hands of everyday computer users.

Sikuli stemmed from the research of Associate Professor Rob Miller, Ph.D. student Tsung-Hsiang (Sean) Chang, and University of Maryland post-doctoral researcher Tom Yeh. It’s a software agent that, through the use of screenshots, allows one to automate just about any task—so long as there’s a GUI involved. Using the Python programming language as its base, Sikuli allows the programming of tasks through a combination of screenshots and simple commands.

In the Wixarica language of Mexico’s Huichol Indians, Sikuli literally means “God’s eye.” It’s a tribute to the tool’s all-seeing approach to computer vision.

“It means using vision in a sort of God-like way, although frankly it’s just trying to be similar to the way human beings look at their screens,” explains Miller. The User Interface Design Group has always been creative in its nomenclature, with monikers for past programs like Chickenfoot, Froggy, and Potluck.

The secret to Sikuli’s appeal is how intuitive it is, something that has rarely if ever been true of programming before. When scripting, Sikuli allows you to write what look like function calls, except with screenshots between the parentheses instead of code.

This type of interface allows for use by beginners and seasoned programmers alike. A simple example, outlined on the Sikuli website, involves inputting screenshots of the Mac Spotlight symbol and a few simple commands (“click,” “type”) in order to automate a Spotlight search for a specific phrase. It’s something a complete novice could do without assistance. From there, applications can get as complex as the Sikuli user wants, depending on his or her creativity and depth of knowledge.

Sikuli was born out of Yeh’s Ph.D. research at MIT, which looked at new ways to use computer vision in user interfaces. His work involved sending photographs to the World Wide Web in order to glean information about their subject matter from other users.

This research became the basis for Sikuli Search, the first iteration of Sikuli. Instead of using pictures from the real world, Sikuli Search used screenshots. For example, a computer user looking to learn the meaning of a particular icon in the Microsoft Word toolbar could take a screenshot of the button and send it to Sikuli Search, which would then visually scan the Web to find a verbal answer to the question.

Meanwhile, Chang and other members of the User Interface Design Group were working on new forms of automation in programming. They created a process that automated redundant and time-wasting tasks on the Web, such as searching for headshots on Google. “What our system allowed you to do was to write a script that would do all of those steps for you,” says Miller.

When Chang began to work with Yeh on perfecting Sikuli Search, he looked for ways to incorporate his work on automation. The result was Sikuli Script, the software agent that may signal the next great leap in programming.

“One of the great things about this collaboration between Sean and Tom is that they each brought complementary skills to the table,” Miller says. “There was Tom doing the back-end image processing stuff and having the deep knowledge there, and Sean putting a great user interface in front of it.”

The group has made Sikuli available as a free download, creating a real-world test environment of the software’s capabilities and applications. It has fostered a rich exchange between users and creators. There’s even a blog tracking programs written using the software. They range from the fun and frivolous (playing virtual piano, automating tasks in the game Mafia Wars) to the just plain useful (cleaning unwanted files from a system).

All of this innovation on the part of users only further drives Miller, Chang and Yeh to strive for improvement. “We’ve gotten lots of feedback and scripts contributed by our users that have really impressed us,” says Chang. “We feel we have to do more on Sikuli so we can make it better, and let users do what they really want on this automation platform.”

The recently released Sikuli 0.10 has taken much of this feedback into account to create a faster, smarter piece of software. Among other upgrades, the new version boasts a new, more flexible Application Programming Interface and the ability to script actions that respond to visual changes on the screen.

At this point in its development, more involved Sikuli Script use requires some understanding of Python. It’s something inexperienced users can currently bypass with the help of a visual recording feature. Miller hopes to eventually build new applications on top of Sikuli’s Python-and-screenshot base that would create even greater ease of use.

A streamlined, novice-friendly Sikuli could one day put programming into the hands of the average computer user. It would mean a sort of democratization of computing, and would have far-reaching cultural implications. “You can look at it as an augmentation of human capability,” Miller observes. “Which is pretty exciting, because we’re not really getting much smarter biologically. I think we need to find ways to make ourselves smarter technologically.”

But theater is terribly important. I mean you have to exercise all of your instrument, your emotional skills and everything. It’s important for actors to be in the theater. Nowadays, there are people who just do TV, and I don’t really call them actors, you know? If you’re not able to fill up a theater and entertain people for two or three hours, who are you? You’re a puppet!

~ Estelle Parsons via phone, in an interview about her role in August: Osage County (which hits Boston this week). What a badass lady.

‘Cats’: Good fur nothin’

please don't eat me

I get it. I see now why some people despise musical theater. Because when they hear the word “musical” they think of this: people in furry ears and painted spandex, slinking around on a cartoony set belting repetitive pop ballads and taking themselves completely seriously.

“Cats” holds the record as the second-longest-running show on Broadway, just below Andrew Lloyd Webber’s other smash “The Phantom of the Opera.” Even though it closed in 2000, “Cats” continues to be synonymous with song-and-dance in our collective consciousness. But I promise you, haters: Not all musicals are like this. Thank the weird supernatural cat god for that.

Because Boston hasn’t seen it enough, “Cats” is once again hissing and slinking its way through town. This latest touring iteration features a top-notch cast that delivers on all the things “Cats” zealots love. But for something so long, intricate and popular, it’s got about as much matter and substance as a hairball.

Conceived by Lloyd Webber, Trevor Nunn and Gillian Lynne, “Cats” draws its inspiration from T.S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.” Eliot wrote the poems for his godchildren; he never would’ve guessed they’d be co-opted into a 1980s synth-pop musical. The future is a funny place.

The plot, such as it is, is about a bunch of felines who call themselves Jellicles and are proud of it. They gather in a trash-strewn alley circa midnight for the “Jellicle Ball,” which has something to do with reincarnation, or whatever. Mostly, it just seems to exist so the cats can sing about how awesome it is to be a cat and how there are different types of cats. And pretty much just to slink around and say the word “cat” a lot.

“Cats” (look, there it is again) is a true ensemble piece, demanding that most every performer onstage can both sing and dance with the best of them. There are acrobatic dances such as “Mr. Mistoffelees,” huge group numbers like “Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats” and weepy ballads, most notably the iconic “Memory.”

Pretty much everyone in the cast is up to the task, channeling their feline sides and performing feats both vocal and balletic. Standout performers include the honey-voiced Tug Watson as Munkustrap, the acrobatic Chris Mackenthun as Mistoffelees and the opera-chopped Nathan Morgan as Gus the Theatre Cat (yes, there’s a cat who is specifically of the theater).

It’s too bad that most of the songs have no musical merit whatsoever, repeating simple phrases and lifted Eliot lines until you feel as if your brain is about to melt out of your ears. Nothing onstage happens for a reason. However virtuoso the performances, the fact that the show has almost no structure or drive makes it doomed to fall flat.

A spectacle? Yes. A pop touchstone? Yes. Bearable? No. But then, I’ve always been a dog person.

“CATS” at the Colonial Theatre, Tuesday night. Through April 18.

“Either Way It’s Going To Be A Spectacle”–Mornin’ Old Sport Introduce Us to Mediocore

Whatever happened to the words? Whatever happened to us? These are the questions that Mornin’ Old Sport asks over and over, like a lover to an old flame. The difference is they’re asking everybody in Boston, and probably the whole world.

Formerly known as Wiffle Bat, the Allston-based band is all about tearing down walls—between people, between genres, and between the singer and the sung-to. Tonight, they take the stage at the Cambridge YMCA, and they really hope you come by.

TeaParty sat down with three of Mornin’ Old Sport’s six members—Zebulon Krol, Jeff Price, and Brian Arnold—at Krol’s apartment on the Berklee campus. A fitting location, considering everyone in the band either went to or is a current student at the school. They come together to make the kind of tuneful, wordy, layered music that would give artists like Beirut and Fanfarlo a run for their collective money.

–Jenna Scherer

How did you guys first get together?

Zeb: It started out with Scott Nanos and me. I was in a band that was kind of falling apart, and one of the kids I was in that band with knew Scott. The first time I saw him, I remember thinking, “There’s something about that guy.” He brought this whole different thing out of me, like, “No, let’s do something weirder!” And so right away there was this really good chemistry. And then it grew from there.

Jeff: The full band didn’t really come together until the end of our recording process for our EP.

Is the band’s name a Great Gatsby thing?

Z: Yeah. Jay Gatsby refers to everyone as “old sport.” Scott and my favorite writer is Fitzgerald, and we relate to Gatsby a lot. He’s such a cool character, because he’s really kind of trashy. You know, he’s trying to be something he’s not, and he probably came from a shady background, but he did it all for love. And I think that’s how Scott and I are in a lot of ways. Our upbringing was not a good scene, and we’re trying to pretend we’re something we’re not. We go nuts for music and art and stuff, and our lives are pretty absurd because of it.

There seem to be a lot of different musical influences at work in Mornin’ Old Sport. What artists made the biggest impression for you guys?

Z: Everyone in the band comes from a totally different background, and that’s a really cool thing, seeing that all get smashed together. I know Dave Stalling’s biggest influence is Igor Stravinsky, and he got his Masters in composition, so he definitely brings a whole different thing to our band. And Kate Smeal is into jazz and folk stuff, and I know she did some musical theater.

J: For me, I’d say John Coltrane. He really tried to bring the human soul back into music. I like a lot of funk and R&B, jazz, the Rolling Stones, the Band—basically any music that you can feel humanity through.

B: Beck is a big influence for me. You look at his older stuff, and each record is different and has a different theme. Like Midnight Vultures, it’s all different genres, all in the same disc. The Magnetic Fields and Björk are pretty up there too.

Z: Yeah, Björk is definitely huge. She can try anything, and she gets away with it. I’m also really inspired by great literature and movies. And lyricists like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, or even someone like Bright Eyes.

Yeah, lyrics are really key for you guys, right?

Z: We really pay attention to the lyrics. I think the overall expectation of lyrics is really low right now, and there are so many that don’t even make any sense, or there’s just one cool line in a song. We just want to do something that’s really good.

If you guys had to put yourself into a genre, what would you call it?

Z: Mediocore. It’s a new genre. Scott came up with that. I guess a lot of people compare us to Beirut, the Smiths, Arcade Fire, though our next album is pretty much straight country folk. It’s gonna sound like throwback Patsy Cline, fucking Ennio Morricone.

B: It’s got some Spanish horns!

Z: But our next album is gonna be very electronic-based. And then after that, we’ve got 24 songs of circus music to record. We just wanna do our thing. We just wanna make something good that we can stand by at the end of the day and say, “Yeah, we’re proud of that.”

Sounds pretty ambitious. Do you think that formal musical education gives you a leg up as a band?

Z: I think we might have some more tricks up our sleeve than other bands. That’s the thing about going to college, it’s like going into a room with a professor who says, “Here’s all this shit that I learned while I was being an idiot my whole life.” And some of it you can take, some of it you can’t. I think training helps. It gives you a language to communicate.

J: You have a bigger vocabulary.

Z: But you can get that in a lot of different ways, so I’m not saying we’re better than kids who didn’t go to music school at all. That’s not the case at all. There are some people who are so naturally gifted, I feel like I’ll never catch up with them.

J: The biggest thing about going to a music school is just making connections with other people who are doing what you’re doing.

Z: That might be our biggest leg up, is that we were just able to meet each other.

B: School’s school.

Z: Yeah, you do what you gotta do, you know? If it helps, do it.

What’s the songwriting process like for Mornin’ Old Sport?

Z: Scott, Kate and I do the songwriting, but we do the arrangements as a group. One of our rules in our band is that we’ll try anything before we say it’s a bad idea. So even if it’s totally off-the-wall, we’ll try it, we do it right, and then decide whether or not we keep it. That’s the thing about music—and I guess it’s true of all art—is that all the fucking stars have to align. You can’t have one bad lyric, you can’t have one bad guitar turn, you can’t have one bad snare hit, everything just has to be like, [makes coming-together noise].

You feel like you have to strive for perfection.

Z: Yeah. Nowadays it’s especially hard, because there’s like the iPhone, and there’s like people flying in space, so the level of perfection in shit is crazy. It’s so much more competitive.

B: Since record sales aren’t what they used to be, there are fewer people that have huge recording budgets and spend a lot of time in a really nice facility with all these people lathering their backs and polishing their sounds and sipping their tea for them. The thing is that we live in this golden age of technology and the internet, where you can have a home studio that’s awesome. So there are a lot of bands that can and do self-produced stuff. And because of that, the music world is flooded right now.

Z: The whole business plan has changed. It used to be that you starved to death until you get really big and then a record label pays you to record. Now it’s like you starve to death to collect gear and then do your own thing.

You played at the Cambridge Y before. What do you like about it as a venue?

Z: We did an EP release there last year for Mourning Sickness. It was the idea of Philip-Michael Scales, who’s the lead singer of This is How Rumors Get Started. He’s a very interesting DIY kid. He feels like there isn’t enough of a music scene of Boston. And he was like, “Why isn’t there a family thing? Why aren’t people really teaming up and putting on big shows?” And he found the Cambridge Y. His idea was that we’d release our album with all these different bands playing, and it’d be kind of a scene-starter. That never really came to fruition, but we’re kind of picking up that idea.

J: The fact that it’s not a bar is really nice because it becomes more of a community thing. The problem with the Boston scene in general is that whenever you’re playing a show, you go into the club or the bar, and people are just observing, they’re not really taking part. Our big thing is trying to get people to interact.

Yeah, audience participation is a major thing for Mornin’ Old Sport, right?

Z: I just want to connect people. That’s my biggest pet peeve in our society right now, that with all the Facebook and text messaging, there’s so little human interaction. I just want to combat that as much as I can. I just want to put people in a room together and just get ‘em to talk. It’s the lost art form. That’s my goal—to get a bunch of people in the same place, and remind them that they exist, and see what happens. It could end up being a train wreck, but either way it’s gonna be a spectacle.

From Teaparty Boston, Jan. 29, 2010

Harry & the Potters: Paving the Way for Wizard Rockers Everywhere

Who ever decided that only the cool kids get to be rock stars? There’s a place on that bright, grimy stage for nerds too, and that’s where bands like Harry and the Potters come in. Yes, they wear round-framed glasses and red-and-gold Gryffindor ties onstage. Yes, they sing songs about magical potions and Quidditch and three-headed dogs and teen-wizard angst. And yes, you’re totally jealous.

Paul and Joe DeGeorge, the fraternal duo with the lightning-bolt guitar straps and brooding boy-wizard looks, unwittingly founded a whole genre when they started up Harry and the Potters right here in Eastern Mass. Theirs was the first band wholly centered around J.K. Rowling’s ridiculously popular book series, and it certainly wasn’t the last. The so-called “Wizard Rock” scene grew from there, to the point where there are now literally hundreds of Potter-themed bands.

Harry and the Potters were last seen headlining at the Middle East Downstairs’ Fifth Annual Yule Ball, a night of Christmas-themed Wizard Rock debauchery. They rocked the all-ages audience with hits like “Save Ginny Weasley” and “Accio Hagrid,” only ceding the stage for a guy in the audience to propose to his girlfriend. Just like the song (and Dumbledore) say, the weapon they have is love.

We caught Paul and Joe, Norwood natives both, one cold Tuesday over some hot coffees. Not as cockle warming as butterbeer, but it’ll do in a pinch.
– Jenna Scherer

How did Harry and the Potters get its start?

Joe DeGeorge: Back in 2002, I was playing a show with my old band Ed in the Refridgerators, and somebody at one of the shows yelled, “I love you, Harry Potter!”

Paul DeGeorge: Joe looked a lot like Harry Potter, especially when he was like 12 or 13.

JD: And Paul was kind of toying around with the idea of having a Harry Potter band. We kind of sat on it for a while.

PD: We always have weird, silly ideas, and sometimes you act on them and sometimes you don’t. And this was just one of them that we thought was good enough to take an afternoon and write a few songs. We played a show in our parent’s shed and we were like, “Awesome. High five. We did it.”

JD: But then the following summer they were releasing the fifth Harry Potter book, and we thought it would be good to record a demo and play at some bookstores. We ended up getting like five shows in the span of 24 hours. And then we decided to just keep playing.

You guys were basically the first band that spurred the whole Wizard Rock thing—

PD: Oh, I thought you were gonna say that we were the first band ever. I was gonna say, no, we weren’t.

How does it feel to have created a genre?

PD: I don’t know if I’d call it a genre. It’s more of a micro-genre. I’m not sure Wizard Rock is on the radar of the average citizen. But it’s pretty cool. Music has changed so much since I was a kid, the pre-internet age, when scenes were built around fanzines. Everyone had their own avenue for finding music they loved. It was all very homegrown. And Wizard Rock is an extension of that.

JD: It grew so fast. I think because of the internet.

PD: We were just thrilled that people were inspired in any way by what we were doing. It’s cool to see that people are starting their own bands and getting out and making music for themselves. Making their own art using Harry Potter.

As a character, Harry Potter is pretty angst-ridden. Do you think that’s why he makes good rock music fodder?

JD: I think that’s a big part of it. He’s sort of got the same ethics that you see in punk rock. He’s able to speak up for what he believes in and stand up against authority when it comes crashing down on him.

PD: He’s also not shy about his feelings either, you know? He doesn’t really hold anything back.

JD: He’s always like, “My life sucks!”

PD: Yeah, he’s kind of emo.

JD: But he’s also kind of a jock.

PD: Yeah, we take a lot of liberties with his character. We pretend he’s much more creative. We always say that our band would be like if Harry quit the Quidditch team and started hanging out with the band geeks.

What’s it like performing with your brother? Is there ever any Oasis-type shit that goes down?

JD: Paul hit me in the face with a guitar once, and knocked one of my teeth out of position.

PD: Yeah, but it wasn’t out of anger. It was just an accident.

JD: He thought he was so cool, twirling his guitar around his back.

PD: It was a good move.

JD: Whipped me in the face.

PD: There’s a good video that we have where we had to go to the dentist the next morning to get Joe’s tooth put back into place. Then he had to get a root canal a year later. Sorry.

JD: Yeah, whatever.

PD: I’m responsible for the fact that Joe has no sensitivity in that tooth anymore.

Sometimes you gotta suffer for your art. You guys have performed in all sorts of places, from clubs like the Middle East to schools and libraries. What’s your favorite kind of venue to play?

JD: Um. Caves.

PD: Caves.

JD: Playing in caves, man. We did a show this summer the night the Half-Blood Prince movie was coming out in this cave in Central Mass.

PD: Really it was a chasm.

JD: Purgatory Chasm.

PD: Yeah, it’s a chasm.

JD: But we pretended it was a cave. It was very cave-like. Like in the book.

PD: Cave-like resonance to the music. That was one of our best shows.

JD: There must have been 70 people who hiked out into the middle of this chasm.

PD: And it was dark, too. No lights around. We arranged so that people were hiking down into the chasm just as it was getting dark. By the time we started playing it was basically pitch black. People brought flashlights and were shining them on us while we played so they could see. Then we all had to hike out of the chasm at like, 10 at night.

That sounds pretty amazing. What do you guys do when you’re not being Harry and the Potters?

JD: I’m in school at Clark University in Worchester studying physics.

PD: I can be considered a fulltime wizard, because I do all the booking and handle all the band managerial stuff. I also co-founded and serve on the board of directors of the Harry Potter Alliance, which is a non-profit activist organization for Harry Potter fans specifically, with activism in relation to stuff that goes on the books. It’s a way to tie that fictional world to our real world in a practical, positive sense.

What kind of causes does the Alliance support?

PD: We do Darfur stuff, equal merit rights stuff. It aims to be a sort of primer for kids to get involved in activism at a younger age. In my high school there was none of that. I mean, some high schools have Amnesty chapters, but it’s tough to give kids a worldview and that’s what we’re hoping to do. Last October we went up to Maine two weeks before they voted on Proposition 1, the marriage equality bill. We all met at this cafe in the morning, we played a quick set for 30 minutes, and then everybody who was at the show went out and canvassed around Portland, and then came back and we had a full-on concert. It was awesome.

Do you see an end date for Harry and the Potters, now that the books are finished and the last movies are being made?

JD: We’re just taking it one step at a time, taking whatever cool, interesting opportunities come along.

PD: Yeah, playing in caves and things like that. We don’t take anything too seriously, and we no longer plan our lives around it to the extent that we did two and three years ago when we were touring like 120 shows a year. It was so intense, and Joe was actually in school for half of it. But since the last book came out, we’ve taken a step back. We’ve only done one tour since then. We just take the craziest opportunities that come our way. We got to play in Alaska two years ago. Somebody actually just got in touch with us about playing in Mexico.

JD: Gotta do it. Complete the North American trinity. I’m all about North American unity. That’s my new thing. My brothers and sisters in Mexico and Canada.

PD: It’s out on the Yucatan Peninsula. She said we could play the show on a beach.

JD: We gotta play on one of those Aztec pyramids!

PD: Oh, good idea. So these are the kind of shows that we try and book now, really far-fetched.

JD: We’re only playing Aztec pyramids from now on.

PD: As far as an end date for Harry and the Potters, it’s already set—as soon as J.K. Rowling lets us play in her backyard, that’s our last show for sure.

Have you ever made contact with her?

PD: I gave her a trophy. The whole story of it is that I was up in Edinburgh where she lives about a year ago, with a few other Harry Potter folks. Rowling couldn’t meet with us, but we did go to her house and have lunch with her personal assistant. I brought a gift, which was a trophy of a witch riding a broomstick that I had found at the dump. Just before we left, I got it engraved at one of those Precious Moments stores at the mall. I packaged it up in this box with one of those light-up bouncy balls, and I put a bunch of reflective paper in there, and I wrote instructions on the package for how to open for the most magical effect, and it involved smashing the package on the table and then opening it really quickly. The assistant was looking at me like I was totally crazy, but the next day I got an email from Rowling thanking me. I got super nervous about trying to contact her, because she’s our creator in a sense. It’s kind of like meeting God. [Laughs] And you never know what God’s gonna think of you.

Unquestionably, there are many compelling reasons not to write. Some are mundane, like having a job, a spouse, a headache. These things can take time and energy away from the creation of literature. So can not having a job, a spouse, and a headache. (In regard to the absence of the headache, it must be said that you can feel too good to write.) There are other mighty rationales for shirking the pen. Not enough money. Too little experience. Bad speller. Not good enough yet. Not good enough compared to Garcia Marquez. Not good enough compared to Shakespeare. Better than Shakespeare but no one seems to agree. Too much ambition. Insufficient ambition. Paranoia. Alcohol. Heroin. Gas pains. Gout. Hay fever.

And of course, there are always powerful metaphysical reasons for not writing. For instance, deep existential dread. The distortions of solitude. The ravages of time. Black holes. The eventual death of the solar system. Being adrift in a meaningless universe in which everything is floating away from everything else. The temptation of silence. By this, I mean that sometimes silence seems more articulate, more full of possibility than language itself; it is the realm of vision, of the masterfully unwritten, of astounding books that will forever be undiminished by their narrowing in reality.

And yet, we go on. Cause… why not?

I love sitting in on rehearsals, especially the ones where you can tell that everyone involved is totally into what they’re putting together. I watched these guys rehearse in a room in the Old South Church on Boylston. Passed by choir practice on the first floor on my way up.

Fave quote I didn’t have room for the in the article came from costume designer Christian Svenson:

So this is me being a real person who does what I studied in school, which is sort of bizarre. I love that my grown-up job involves making multi-limbed alien costumes and a Loch Ness Monster. At the end of the day, that’s what I’m… doing. I wouldn’t want it to go any other way.

————-

From the Weekly Dig, 27 Jan 09

INTERGALACTIC TRANSFER STUDENTS
Plan 9 meets A Nation of Millions

Talking goats, breakdancing. Yeah, you heard me. Talking goats. Breakdancing.

How about this: hip-hop opera. Stage three supermassive black hole. Prehistoric dinosaur planet. Party spaceship. DRUGS.

If this assortment of plot points doesn’t at least cause you to throw a glance over at Intergalactic Transfer Students, you’ve got a serious fun allergy. You should really get that looked at.

A hip-hopera set to take the stage at the BCA, Intergalactic Transfer Students is pretty much exactly as weird and awesome as it sounds. It’s the glow-in-the-dark brainchild of Papa Bakes and Virtue, scions of local hip-hop collective Fameless Fam.

By day, they’re Eric Baker and Will Kowall, two Emerson students who first bonded over impromptu freestyling sessions in Boston Common. According to Baker, the two couldn’t be more different in their artistic approaches. “Will has a bit more of an Elliott Smith vibe than me. Whereas I’m really on the other side—I can’t even take myself seriously.”

Which is exactly how the idea for a rap about a seven-tentacled jock from outer space came about: Kowall suggested a deadly serious topic for a song, and Baker was having none of it. “I was like, ‘Dude, please, can we write anything else? Aliens. Anything.’ And so we ended up writing ‘Tulon Drox.’”

“Tulon Drox” became one of 19 tracks on ITS, a concept album that Kowall describes as “a typical American story, but set on other planets.” Part Heavy Metal and part The Little Prince, the plot follows Bakes and Virtue on a planet-hopping intergalactic odyssey. They’re two humans out to save Earth from the evil clutches of the Whack Emcees, commercialized rappers whose lame-ass lyrics are literally causing Armageddon.

It was Baker’s idea to turn it into a full-on theatrical production. “The two of us could just do it onstage by ourselves, but I thought, hey, let’s add a dozen dancers and some crazy costumes and lighting and sound effects. Let’s really go all out.”

With that in mind, Baker and Kowall amassed their army. They enlisted Christian Svenson, an Emerson alum, to design costumes ranging from green aliens to volcano women for ITS‘ ensemble, and choreographer Wendy O’Byrne to come up with dance moves to match the insanity of the album’s ideas. Then there’s set designer Mark Jones, who used to repair military planes in flight (no joke) and is now putting together ITS‘ spaceship.

“Some of the calls I get are like, ‘Eric! We just found this disco ball on Craigslist and peeled off all the mirrors and painted it in blacklight paint. Don’t worry, we’re making a cool hula-hoop ring for it,’” recalls Baker with a grin.

O’Byrne says that the whole hip-hopera idea was hard to sell at first. “When we were auditioning dancers, everyone was like, ‘What is this?!’ But now, every time I go back to the dance studio where I teach, people are like, ‘Oh dude dude dude! Do you have any more spots in the show?’”

But it all paid off in the end. “What drives this production forward is the sentiment that’s in the show—that you may not have the big sponsorship and the airtime, but you just have to do it because you love it,” says Svenson. “And if you stick to it, somebody’s going to notice that there’s something right with the world.”

INTERGALACTIC TRANSFER STUDENTS
WED 2.3.10–SAT 2.6.10
BCA CALDERWOOD PAVILION
539 TREMONT ST., BOSTON
617.933.8600
WED–SAT 8:30PM
$5-$10
INTERGALACTICTRANSFERSTUDENTS.COM
BOSTONTHEATRESCENE.COM