We in Generation Y had it good. We saw the emergence of the sourest candies ever made, while the good old candies you could choke on were still there.

From our sugary amazingnesses to favorite fast food, here’s a list of 10 things that taste like our childhood.

1. Airheads

The originals are still available. (Media credit/Travis Hornung/Flickr)

After taffy, there were Airheads. These babies are flattened sugar with artificial flavoring. Mmmm.

Manufactured by Perfetti Van Melle of Erlanger, Kentucky for the past two decades, the mini ones are a tease, but the big, full size, foil-packaged Airheads really do bring back memories. You could get more than one for a dollar at the concession stand at the little league field. Watermelon is particularly good, but we also remember the sour varieties and the odd “white” Airhead.

Kids today know of Airheads because they’ve done a Spongebob variety and in 2007 and 2008, a new “BerryHot” flavor gets warm in your mouth, and “Chillin” flavors are supposed to have a “cold” feeling. They aren’t the same. The originals are still available, and that’s all that matters.

2. Play-Doh

You know you went for it at least once. (Media credit/WikiMedia)

You don’t have to admit that you might have nibbled on the product of your Fun Factory. It’s OK. You ate the Doh. We know it.

We didn’t have clay growing up. We had Play-Doh. Originally created in the 1940s as a wallpaper cleaner, the makers soon realized kids were playing with it. Play-Doh was born. The product may have had its golden age slightly before our generation, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single kid our age (and by kid, we mean mid 20s) that didn’t play with Play-Doh growing up.

And don’t worry; it’s non-toxic.

3. Atomic Fireballs

15 million Fireballs are consumed weekly (Media credit/pgh_shutter/Flickr)

Round, red, hot. Nello Ferrara’s 1954 contribution to the candy world was extremely popular in the 80s and 90s when we were sucking them down, and we might still be found trying to talk to our boss with an Atomic Fireball that leaves our mouth red.

The company claims that 15 million atomic fireballs are consumed by Americans every week.

This is one of those things that, when we’re 50, we can tell our kids that “back in our day, Atomic Fireballs were a nickel. A NICKEL!”

Atomic Fireballs are part of the Jawbreaker family. There are also four flavors of Atomic Sourball.

4. Plastic

Everything we touched was made of plastic. (Media credit/Kat Gloor/Flickr)

Sippy cups. Action figures. Furniture. Buttons. Pens. Soda bottles. Baby dolls.

Almost every freakin thing we touched — and subsequently put in our months — as kids was made of plastic.

We were born in the plastic revolution. Do you know what they used to use before plastic? GLASS!

We didn’t use glass. The only things made of glass back in our day were Gatorade bottles.

One Blast editor said she can’t smell plastic without thinking of her Glo Worm, which she’d always have in her mouth as a child.

Plastic has since been vilified. You don’t even see plastic bags at the supermarket anymore.

5. Fundip and Pixy Stix

Pure, tooth-rotting sugar (Media credit/WikiMedia)

This is candy. Pure, tooth-rotting sugar that will make you bounce off the walls 20 minutes before you pass out from the crash.

Fun Dip has been on the market since 1942, when it was called Lik-M-Aid. We remember the stick is called Lik-A-Stix. It was white and flavorless, and that’s how we liked it. Willy Wonka Candy Company ruined Fun Dip by making the stick flavored in the modern era.

Fun Dip is the same sugar as Pixy Stix. Three flavors come in a package, separated, of course. The stick becomes a yucky mess.

Good times.

6. Candy Cigarettes

I never got the urge to smoke. (Media credit/WikiMedia)

In 1991 the government tried to ban candy cigarettes.

They failed, but the fun chalky pretend cigarettes with a red tip are all but gone now. The bubblegum ones were not very good because the paper tasted, well, like paper. The chalky candy ones were fun to suck on and pretend we were having a good ol’ smoke.

I never had the urge to actually smoke because of candy cigarettes.

According to Wikipedia, candy cigarettes are banned Finland, Norway, Ireland, Turkey and Saudi Arabia .

Still, it was fun to buy a pack whenever the ice cream truck came up the hill when I was a kid.

7. McDonald’s French Fries

Hey Jimmy, what did you win in the Monopoly game? OBESITY! (Media credit/Scorpions and Centaurs/Flickr)

McDonald’s used to cook with trans fats. I think it even used animal fat before our time.

French fries are God-awful for you. Dietitians will tell you that they’re one of the worst things you could possibly consume.

Fuck that.

OK, so I have gone a whole year without eating a single French fry, but McDonald’s French fries are the best French fries in the world, perhaps second only to the Glenwood Drive-In in Hamden, Connecticut.

They’ve tasted the same since we were kids. They’re delicious, and we’re all fat today because of them.

But…memories…

8. Big League Chew

It comes in a pouch! Cool! You mean they make tobacco in a pouch too? Gross! (Media credit/thinkjose/Flickr)

Here’s another attempt by big tobacco to get kids hooked, right?

Horseshit.

The only bad thing about Big League Chew was that the taste didn’t last very long, and you always had to go “dipping” for more.

The original was good, but I always bit down on a big wad of watermelon when I was on the pitcher’s mound in my little league glory days. My teeth ache at the memory of chewing down on a golf ball-sized wad of gum.

9. Sunny Delight

I don’t know what’s in Sunny D. I don’t wanna know what’s in Sunny D. All I know is that it was better than soda, OJ and that purple stuff, and it’s got healthy junk in it.

10. Old-School Doritos

75 cents! Back in my day!

Jesus Christ, is it any wonder we’re all out of shape?

But do you remember old-school Doritos? Before “Nacho Cheesier” and “Collisions” came to be? Back when it was just a cheesy corn chip?

Really, all you needed were Doritos, Fritos, some pretzels and maybe some Smartfood Popcorn, and you’ve got yourself a party!

There were some failed experiments. Remember Doritos 3D?

Plus, Doritos always has great Superbowl commercials.

What did I miss? Share your favorite reminiscent tastes in the comments section!

Blast columnist Lindsay Milgroom and writers Sam Peters and Brooklynne Peters contributed to this report

I only had a few short days in Liege, and my first day was set in the typical rainy Belgian weather, a cool reminder of the oncoming autumn season and which added an aura of mystique. Set in the valley of the River Meuse, and hemmed in by its foothills, the quaint narrow streets are filled with pubs and snack shops. Pommes frites — French fries — are a common craving amongst the citizens. Famous for its chocolates and beers, the Belgian Blue Beef and wines for even the pickiest connoisseur are not to be skipped. There are modern shopping markets, palaces and judicial buildings and outdoor amphitheaters.

I met some friends and colleagues who were also over for the Gare du Liege festivities, and our first night was spent enjoying the above mentioned delights at a Spanish-named, Italian restaurant named La Cantina. The food was rustic and flavorful, with fresh seafood and tender beef cuts. Outside in the courtyard a table of children colored, and upon exploring, boasted to me of their abilities to speak Japanese and English, as well as their native French and German. There are a number of restaurants that feature an inner, courtyard-style garden, and our second meal together brought us into the cozy but modern ambiance of Jardin des Begards. Again the service, and tasty treats were unforgettable, the lighting swirled in colors around you, nothing was quite the same any time you glanced up and our meal felt a bit like a grown-up version of the Mad Tea Party from Alice in Wonderland, complete with a lovely round-faced Cheshire Cat chattering in the garden for his deserved attention, and receiving well his worth.

With the weather clearing the rest of the trip into crisp sunny days, and the sun glistening off the Meuse, our group set out to explore the city and was drawn to some of the cathedrals. Religion has always maintained a high importance to the city; with the ruling party typically a Prince-Bishop, a great number of cathedrals have been constructed for over 1,000 years. As a result of the constant process of wars and rebuilding, the city has a highly developed Archeoforum, which is a result of nearly 100 years of archaeological excavation and contains remains dating as far back as the Paleolithic era. The charismatic Cathedral St Bartholomew which is the oldest dating back to 1015 boasts a festive red and white icing-like paint job and a variety of influences ranging from Romanesque to Neoclassical. The grand gothic-like St. Paul’s Cathedral dates from the same era, but with major renovations throughout time has taken on the character of the famed Parisian Cathedrals. Near the foot of St. Bartholomew is a climb of 400 steps along a stairway called “Montagne de Bueren,” leading from Hors-Château to the Citadel. Once atop the city, the view overlooking the valley showcases the river, and ranges from the Gare du Liege at the foot of the Cointe Hills to the city-centre. The Citadel is now home to a modern hospital complex, but the brick and mortar remains of its original duty still stand guard and offer a fascinating glimpse into Liege’s strategic quality recognized by her founders.

On the outskirts of the city in the Seraing district, known for its factories and steelwork, there is a lasting reminder of the religious age, allowing for the tradition of great handcrafted arts to survive, in what was once a great Cathedral and later convent. The Crystal factory of Val St. Lombard is nearly a lost art. Here, crystal glass is sculpted into delicacies for your home. Artists create their glassware or artworks from scratch, a hands-on process from the mixing of the powders to creating the molten crystal and finally spinning a vase from the kiln like a skillful Pied Piper. The steel industry made a lasting mark on the area, and there are still a handful of operating factories and signs of the industrial age, but the economy has shifted to studies of chemistry and biology with a large number of Liege’s residents being college students.

Liege has an obvious significant historical value, dating back to Charlemagne and the Middle Ages, when the city was home to his mother. A signifying reason was accessibility and topography along the invaluable River Meuse. The river is not only a trading route, but home to many nautical-know-hows in the colorful varieties of barge-meets-houseboat. The rolling, tree-lined river valley showcasing the charming, eclectic mix of architecture and creates a gingerbread landscape, nestling the city inside hills and popularizing the city as an effective defense against enemy forces during the wars. The Battle of the Bulge, the bloodiest skirmish American forces saw in WWII was fought near the city, and around the city there are a multiple of monuments to those who lost lives in all battles.

The new Calatrava-forged Gare du Liege was constructed over an arduous 12 years, built over the existing, continuously-operating, original train station. The project cost 245 million Euros to upgrade the track system, allowing for high speed train accessibility. The result re-centers Liege as a key transportation hub which in turn revitalizes the city. The final result was a sculptural masterpiece of steel and concrete, softly mimicking the undulating hills and taking on almost as if by osmosis the magical charm of its new home. Coinciding with the beginning of the Festival of Wallonia in the district of Liege, the inauguration boasted a never before seen performance by Frank Dragone and performers of Cirque du Soleil fame, employing many local dancers and talents, and reminiscent of the Olympics opening ceremonies acts. There was a reception in which many local dignitaries and government officials attended, and the performance, set on the train track platforms, and included trapeze artists, ballet, opera, fireworks, and a handful of trick-pony horsemen. There were large, projected images of video footage showing the construction of the station, highlighting the proud citizens bringing the arcs to life. There was sincerity, and a celebration. As with any Cirque du Soleil performance, but especially here, in Liege, at a train station, the music, lighting and performances were exhilarating and sealed Liege as one of my fondest memories.

First we had Napoleon, the nunchuck-wielding, moon-boot wearing dancing fiend. Then there was Nacho, the cook-turned-wrestler in “Nacho Libre.” In “Gentlemen Broncos,” we meet Benjamin Purvis, the quiet science-fiction lover whose mom sells nightgowns and popcorn balls for a living.

In “Broncos,” Hess takes us into Benjamin’s world of cowboy heroes, battle stags, pooping snakes and transvestites. Benjamin finds himself in uneasy situations involving blow-darts, hand massages, guardian angels and shootouts.

So color me surprised when I sit down to talk with Hess and find that, besides his freakish height (6’5”), he looks pretty normal, even average. In comfortable jeans, black-rimmed glasses and a black flannel shirt, he doesn’t even vaguely resemble the outrageous characters he creates. But as we begin to discuss the process of what it was like bringing “Broncos” to life, Hess reveals his fascinating and hilariously weird brain, showing that he might be more like his characters than he seems.

Blast: You say that a lot of your stories are autobiographical.

Jared Hess: Yeah. When my family first moved to Idaho, before school started, there was a trip to a Shakespearean festival in southern Utah. I didn’t have any friends yet, and my mom’s like, “You’d better go on this thing, it’ll be awesome, you’ll meet a lot of new friends.” So this girl and this guy who were very similar to Loni and Tabitha made friends with me and were like “Come sit by us! It’d be awesome!” I was sitting just like Benjamin was and they busted out the lotion and he started giving her a hand massage and blowing in her ear, and all the kids on the bus were like, “Gosh that kid’s an idiot. He’s hanging out with those guys!” So it was really uncomfortable. It was all the gross crap that happens in the back of a van bus.

My wife Jerusha…has a 15-year-old cousin who lives up in Alaska, and he’s been writing really messed-up science fiction stories that make his mom cry. We read some of them and the content is quite disturbing. His were a little medieval. I tried to block it out of my mind. It was a lot of…slapping.

Blast: In what ways do you see yourself in Benjamin Purvis?

Jared Hess: I think I identify with him, in him being kind of an outsider a little bit, but someone who’s creatively engaged, although he’s misunderstood in the things he’s trying to create. I channel that for sure. Especially as a kid I was trying to make my own videos even though people may have gone “Oh well, what are you doing?” You know? It was important to me.

The mother character in this film is based on my mom. She worked for a modest nightgown company and sold popcorn balls that me and my five younger brothers would have to go peddle around…so many things that happened to Benjamin in the film have happened to me.

Blast: One thing that’s a little different about Benjamin is that, you know, with Napoleon, he’s very outlandish. Benjamin is very relatable. He’s a normal kid. And besides the fact that he’s wicked into sci-fi, you really kind of think he’s not a nerd.

Jared Hess: Yeah, yeah. He’s the most normal character in the film. He’s surrounded by a lot of eccentric personalities. You kind of learn about his weird side through his work. But definitely, yeah, he just seems like a normal kid.

Blast: Is Ronald Chevalier based on anyone?

Jared Hess: One time I was a camera assistant during college, and I was working on a really low-budget independent film about Mormon pioneers coming to Utah. The screenwriter visited the set one day, and he was rocking the same clothes as Ronald Chevalier’s the first time you see him. The same Bluetooth earpiece that he never uses. He just looked awesome.

Blast: Tell us about putting the look for the film together.

Jared Hess: To me it’s really important. There’s such a hand-made quality, I think about all of it. It’s all from our style and It’s fun that people can recognize your work based on looking at it. It’s important to get the right kind of tone out there. We shot the film entirely on location in Utah. But the science fiction aspects of it, you know i borrowed a lot of things from my favorite science-fiction films. You don’t really see the big budget glossy expensive CG stuff. You know, like, the battle stags and crap, that stuff was in my trapper keeper when I was like, 12. Stuff that I’d drawn. A lot of the ideas that are in (Benjamin’s) story are, you know, really lame ideas that I had as a kid.

Blast: You’ve got some pretty fierce animal action going on in this film.

Jared Hess: We do!

Blast: You’ve got like a wolf, a bobcat, a snake, like all this stuff. Did Mike White actually have the live snake on him?

Jared Hess: He did. That was a real snake. His name was Peaches. And (Mike) got to be very good friends with Peaches. When we were shooting the snake would…he couldn’t control it very well and it was always gravitating toward Jennifer Coolidge’s chest (laughs) and she would would go “Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!” But it was very tame. It’s an albino boa. Weird, huh?

Blast: And it knows how to poop on cue?

Jared Hess: Yeah pretty much (laughs). We had a little hose hooked up to an air compressor full of beef stew (laughs). It was some gross mixture, I think it had apple sauce in it and mustard.

Blast: Not much worse than the real thing?

Jared Hess: I know, totally. Yeah, they were like, “This smells worse than crap!”

Blast: That was definitely a shocked laugh for me.

Jared Hess: I know, it’s funny because people either laugh at that or they think that it wasn’t meant to happen! People have asked me, “Was that real snake-poo? Did that happen and you just happened to be rolling?”

Blast: Well, you’re still trying to wrap your mind around the fact that he’s wearing a snake, and then all of the sudden…

Jared Hess: (laughs) Yeah, the bobcat actually had a bigger role but…wild animals aren’t really meant to be controlled. But we got it to eat cat food.

Blast: And a gonad?

Jared Hess: Yeah totally. That was like a ball of cat food.

Blast: Where does the name “Gentlemen Broncos” come from?

Jared Hess: My mom had a parenting book written in the ‘50s called “So You Want to Raise A Boy?” There was a chapter in there where the author referred to the 16-year-old stage in a young man’s life. He called it the “Gentlemen Bronco” phase of life where young men like to take their shirts off and mow the lawn. It didn’t make much sense, but I really liked the title.

Blast: This is a pretty different role for Jennifer Coolidge.

Jared Hess: We knew that we wanted Jennifer to play the mom. You can see her real, kind of tender sweet side. She’s really not that glammed up in this at all. She’s kind of a little more “Middle America.”

Blast: Kind of drab almost.

Jared Hess: Yeah yeah. I felt bad that we put her in such bad clothes. She kept teasing me. But she had so much fun. And you know, she’s so great at improv. It’s funny, cause at the cast and crew screening, everyone had their favorite improvised moment that she did. Not all of them made it into the film, but some of them are on the DVD. When the scene ended, we’d kind of let her say whatever she wanted for at least a take or two and then everybody was in stitches. It’s not really about one-liners and a punch-line of a joke in this film. But you kind of get to choose what’s funny to you.

Blast: All of your characters in your movies are pretty quirky, but in this one, even down to the extras, like the ones in the choir scene – where do you find these weird looking people?

Jared Hess: (Laughs) It’s funny because the choir scene was mostly made up of my family (laughs).

Blast: Well now I’ve really offended you! Great!

Jared Hess: No, no. It’s funny because actually, like…my wife’s handicapped aunt was in that scene. (Also) one of her cousins who has Down’s Syndrome. Both of which we’re very, very close to, obviously. The extras in the film – we like to populate it with authentic people. We’re not going to a fancy Hollywood extras casting agency. We’re getting people that we interact with, you know, daily. That you see at the grocery store. A couple of my little brothers were actually Cyclops guys. They were like, (Napoleon voice) “Jared, I can’t see a dang thing in these!”

Blast: Even when Chevalier is doing the Q&A session and there are all of those sci-fi fans. I mean they’re just interesting to look at. They’re just funny people.

Jared Hess: For some of those things, we really try to get science fiction fans. So it was fun.

Blast: Sam Rockwell plays two roles in this movie. What was it like working with him?

Jared Hess: We knew that we wanted to party with Sam Rockwell. I’m a big fan of Sammy. Even though he plays two pretty funny roles in this film, when he comes out of the trailer, out of wardrobe and makeup, he’s in complete character. You know, he’s like, goin’ for it. I’ll say, “Sam, I wanna tell you something.” And he’ll say “Hey, hey, hey. What? I’m Bronco. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He’s pretty die-hard. Like, he’d be watching episodes of Lonesome Dove in his trailer. He was really channeling some cowboy thunder for Bronco, which I loved.

Blast: What was it like working with Michael Angarano?

Jared Hess: It was awesome. A real pleasure. I mean, he’s so talented and he’s really effortless when he’s acting and bringing to life a character, and that was really important. You know we spent a lot of time trying to find the right person to play him and he ended up being just perfect for it.

He and Napoleon are very very different. And I think a lot of people, with Napoleon, were like, “Gosh! This kid!” you know either they really actually knew somebody like that or they were like “This guy’s obnoxious and I don’t like to have to do anything with people like that.” But with Benjamin, he’s more accessible on an emotional level.

Blast: The everyman.

Jared Hess: Yeah, yeah.

Blast: So we have to talk about Jemaine Clement. I’m a huge “Flight of the Conchords” fan. As soon as I saw he was in this, I was like, “I gotta go see this!” What was it like to work with him?

Jared Hess: Yeah yeah! He is one of the most humble, sweet down to earth guys I’ve ever met in my life. Like, his success has not changed him at all. He’s still hangin’ with the same pals that he’s always had.

Blast: Like Bret?

Jared Hess: Yeah, yeah totally (laughs). He’s so funny. He would have ideas on the set of something funny to do or try, and he’s just brilliant. The guy’s so funny. His timing and everything. He was a dream to work with.

Blast: This is a completely different character from the one we all know him for. In “Flight of the Conchords,” he’s so self-depricating and a putz. But in this, he’s arrogant!

Jared Hess: He’s a totally different character. I remember when our sound designers were working on the film, they were like, “Where’d you find that British actor that plays Chevalier?” And I was like, “Oh, that’s Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords.” They were like “What? That’s him? Really?” They didn’t believe me. They didn’t put it together.

Blast: He really pulls off that accent.

Jared Hess: Yeah, it’s great. And I love when you watch an actor, and you don’t go “Oh, that’s Jemaine, from Flight of the Conchords.” That’s always a testimony, I think, to them, that they’re really becoming the character.

Blast: How did you place him in that role?

Jared Hess: We sent him a script, and he called back and he was like (impersonating New Zealand accent) “Yeah man, I really want to do this. I’ll do anything you want. Do you have anybody playing Bronco?” And I was like, “Yeah, we got Sam Rockwell.” And he said, “Oh, yeah, he’ll do great, man.” And then I said, “You know, we were thinking Chevalier for you.” And he’s like “Oh yeah, he’s great.” Jemaine wanted to play the guy as an American, but I told him to watch “Logan’s Run” and try and do Michael York. Then he called me back and was like (impersonating Chevalier) “Hello, Dr. Ronald Chevalier.” And I said, that’s what we’ll do!

Blast: What are your comedic influences?

Jared Hess: I guess it’s life. Letting those awkward beats play out. That happens in life all the time. For me they’re fun and very uncomfortable. A lot of people that watch our films, because of that uneasiness, are not sure if, gosh, something really disturbing is gonna happen. And then when they’re relieved to know that it didn’t go to the dark place they thought it might go to, then the second time around they’re like, “Ahhh.” They’re enjoying it cause they know it’s not gonna go there.

Blast: It’s okay to laugh. I know what you’re talking about cause I could feel that tension building. You’re thinking, “Benjamin has just got to explode sometime soon, and I’m gonna be really unhappy if that doesn’t happen.” And so when he just goes crazy on everybody, it was so fulfilling.

Jared Hess: Yeah, gratifying.

Blast: And you’re like, “Yes! Okay. Good.”

Jared Hess: Yeah, it’s good. Cause he gets walked on the whole movie. He’s a polite, good kid.

Blast: Something that sets your comedy apart, too, from the rest of the stuff that’s out there right now is… lots of stuff out there is very profane. In your films people say “gosh” and “darn” a lot, and Chevalier says…

Jared Hess: Dagnammit! (laughs) That word was improvised. My dad always used to be like, “Dagnabbit!” Then I told Jemaine to say it, and he was like (imitating New Zealand accent), “Ok, yeah, yeah, I’ve never heard that word before, but I’ll try it.” And so we’re shooting (and he says), “Isn’t that why we do what we do, dagnammit?!” And I was like, “Dagnammit? You just made a new word!”

Blast: Do you intentionally keep out the curse words? Is it for comedy or is it for other reasons?

Jared Hess: You know, it’s funny, because it’s such a part of how I talk. I came from a big Mormon family and we were all taught not to swear. So I don’t feel comfortable swearing. You know what I mean? I think it’s just our sense of humor.

Blast: Yeah.

Jared Hess: You know, it’s just not my personality. So that just kind of naturally works its way into our dialogue. So we have a lot of swear word replacements like “flippin’” and “friggen.”

Blast: Your wife, with whom you co-write everything, has just written a romantic comedy.

Jarod Hess: She did, yeah.

Blast: Are you going to be directing that?

Jarod Hess: I don’t know if she’ll let me. I think I’ll ruin it. She’s super-talented. I mean, she may direct it. She’s not decided yet.

Blast: Will it be similar to your previous movies?

Jared Hess: No, it’s something totally different. She’s like, “I get to make a girl movie now.”

“Gentlemen Broncos” is now in theaters.

But this indie band won’t be categorized.

Springing out of Abilene, Texas and now residing in Austin, the band is promoting their new album 20,000 Ghosts by embarking on a 31-date national tour. Blast caught up with them while they were playing in Boston, and they talked about everything from what itis like to record their first full album to their biggest influence, Miley Cyrus.

In a lot of ways, The Rocketboys are just like every other indie band you’ve seen — they’re long-haired, scruffy-faced boys wearing pearl snaps and skinny jeans. But as the six of us chatted in the back of their tour van, which didn’t take very well to the cobblestone streets of Boston, it became clear that the Rocketboys are not just another indie band.

“Anyone can make an artist myspace,” said lead singer Brandon Kinder, “and get their music out to different people. But I think there’s a certain level where it’s a little bit more than just a fun thing you’re doing.”

The Rocketboys are trying to get ahead of the game by being what few indie bands are with their music — responsible.

“We’re trying to separate ourselves by pursuing music professionally without the support of a record label,” said Daniel Wheeler, guitarist. “We have an extensive tour schedule. We have a publicist. We’re trying to surround ourselves with a team that a record label would provide to a band, but weire trying to do it ourselves, because we like having control of the business of our band.”

Add professionalism to a band that sounds as good live as on a record, and itis a surprise that these guys havenit been signed yet. Their show later that evening backed up bassist Josh Campbellis assertion that sounding good live is something else that sets The Rocketboys apart.

“It’s pretty easy now to like, get garageband and lay down a song, and autotune it,” Campbell said. “We take a lot of pride in our live shows, and making (them) as good as they can be, because I think thatis where some bands are lacking.”

The expansive sound of The Rocketboys’ music is enhanced by their deeply personal lyrics, like these from Heartbeat:

“I would sell you out in a heartbeat/Cause you can defend yourself.”

But songwriting is the one thing that The Rocketboys don’t hold to an exact formula. Band members propose ideas to one another and piece together songs, aiming for catchy melodies with hooks.

“But we definitely try to take bits and pieces of bands that we like and we just put together things that we think sound good,” said keyboard player Justin Wiseman. “And inevitably it borrows a little bit from other people, but our idea is just creating beautiful music.”

According to Brandon Kinder, though, the order of production usually stays the same.

Typically, it’s always music first. Ask questions later.

Though they’ve been playing together since college, 20,000 Ghosts is The Rocketboys first full album. “It was like what we’d done in the past, but amplified, said guitarist Daniel Wheeler. They said the recording sessions, which often lasted up to 10 hours, were exhausting, but in the end, they came out with a product that they could be proud of.

“We’re just trying to create something timeless that people can enjoy,” said Kinder.

The band, who has played with now-popular bands like Grizzly Bear and Eisley, said they really look up to artists like Andrew Byrd, My Morning Jacket and Miley Cyrus?

“She’s pretty much our main influence,” said Kinder with a wry smile.

The next stop for the band after Boston was New York City’s CMJ Music Festival.

“We’re very excited,” said Kinder. “It was kind of a close call. We were kind of accepted at the last minute. We were kind of planning our tour around potentially playing it, which may or may not be the best way to plan a tour”

But like Kinder said, they got accepted and went on to play in one of the nation’s biggest cities for up-and-coming musicians. The Rocketboys’ formula seems to be working so far, and if they continue producing quality music like the stuff on 20,000 Ghosts, we’ll be hearing from them for years to come.

Visit The Rocketboys’ website at myspace.com/rocketboys, and look for their album “20,000 Ghosts” on iTunes.

Rosenbaum’s winning stout is being brewed by The Boston Beer Company and served at Gillette Stadium for Patriots season this year. The next contest is going on now, and the deadline is December 18. The winner also gets a little chunk of change: $2,000.

“The first two pre-season games were hot summer nights, and they sold out the first night. And the first home game, which was also a warm day, it sold out as well. So that’s very gratifying,” said Rosenbaum, who holds Patriots season tickets. His stout is lighter than other stouts, but still holds all the depth of flavor that’s looked for. Sometimes when you drink a a beer, you’re tasting it for the next hour or so. Not the case with Rosenbaum’s, which adds to its popularity at the stadium.

Rosenbaum first became interested not so much in brewing, but in beers, when he studied in the UK during his time in college. He found he liked beers quite unlike the ones he could find in the United States, which were usually light and thin. He enjoyed a beer with a lot of flavor — multiple components coming together to form a more harmonious brew. “This was some time ago, but when I came back to the States, there weren’t a lot of imports so I just drank what I could find and was always looking for other interesting beers,” he said.

A few years ago Rosenbaum received a homebrewing kit as a gift, and brewed his first batch. “My first batch wasn’t horrible,” he says, “but it certainly wasn’t great either.”

Looking for guidance, he joined Brew Free or Die, New Hampshire’s oldest homebrew club, and slowly learned what he had been doing wrong with his first attempts at brewing. A few parts of the process had been left out in the brewing kit directions he’d received. There’s a whole list of things of what to do, or not do, so that off-flavors aren’t introduced to a batch of beer. “For example, you have to boil a batch and then cool it. And if you stir your beer really vigorously to cool it down and break the surface tension then you introduce cardboard flavors into your beer,” Rosenbaum explained. There are many rules like this in homebrewing, and each recipe has its own quirks.

It took him a few years of practice and four tries to get the batch right. Rosenbaum entered the third batch of his Oatmeal Stout into last year’s Patriot Homebrew Contest (which didn’t place), though he knew going into it that it wasn’t the beer he wanted it to be. “It tasted good but it was a little thin in the mouth,” he said. “I had decided to add a kind of bourbon flavor to it by adding whiskey that had been soaked in oak chips. So the flavor was good but it was a little… ” he makes a hand gesture to show ‘lacking,’ his palms turned upward to the ceiling.

It was his fourth batch that won. Rosenbaum’s winning brew is full-flavored and full-bodied. It’s rich without being indulgent, flavorful without being bitter. It’s malty and sugary at the same time, the deep black color of the brew paired nicely with a creamy head.

Currently, Rosenbaum is back in his kitchen, settling back into his brewing. His kitchen is more of a mad scientist’s laboratory. Cabinets open to expose large metal bins with grates in the bottom for percolation. Tubes are hooked up to faucets to let fermented brews flow out. He has two refrigerators, one for food, and one that holds three kegs of whatever brew he’s working on at the current moment. To challenge himself, he’s taking award-winning recipes as a base and tweaking them a bit here and there to create something totally new. “Even the smallest change can make quite a bit of difference,” he says.

A few weeks ago, Rosenbaum had an English Best Bitter in a plastic bin cooling on his front steps, the keg sitting in a vat of ice water. Since it’s still the fall season and temperatures still vary daily, a mechanized thermometer maintains the temperature by activating a fan if the vat gets too warm. The Bitter is intended to be a beer to drink several glasses of over the course of an evening, while not having to worry about getting drunk.

Winning the Patriot Homebrew Contest added quite a lot of excitement to his life, but Rosenbaum’s ready to try out new recipes. “I think it’s a great thing (Samuel Adams) does for others. They show a lot of support for the homebrewing community,” he said. “Their president, Jim Koch, started off as a homebrewer and created a whole company out of it. I don’t think he’s forgotten his roots, and it’s a great thing to see.”

Michael Shanks is an actor, and while it’s easy to get lost in the character he has played on, off and on again for a dozen years, there’s a lot under the surface.

Born in Vancouver and raised in small town British Columbia, Shanks began his acting career playing Charlie Brown in the fourth grade play. He witnessed his first television production in college while taking a beach break from trying out for a play. Ironically, it was “MacGyver” that shanks saw being filmed, not knowing of course that he would one day star beside Richard Dean Anderson in “SG-1.”

He made his television debut in a 1993 episode of “The Commish,” a popular ABC crime drama. He landed a lot of minor roles before getting his big break on “Stargate SG-1″ in 1997, staring in 196 episodes in the series as an adventurous archeologist named Dr. Daniel Jackson. Since the end of “Stargate SG-1″ in 2007, Shanks, 38, has been trying to remake himself as an actor

“Well its a double-edged sword, I will say this,” Shanks said in his interview with Blast. “The things that come down the pipe, career-wise, that are offers to pay the bills are sort of sci-fi related projects.”

But, humbly, Shanks admits that all he can do is keep trying to land roles — hopefully roles that aren’t nerdy archeologists. “You just have to get back in a line as if you’re starting all over again,” he said.

We saw some of this. Shanks left “SG-1″ after season 5 and landed a few small roles, including two episodes of “Andromeda,” where he met his wife. It’s possible we may never have seen Daniel Jackson again if Shanks was offered another starring role (pure speculation). But Daniel’s was a popular role, and Shanks returned to “Stargate,” first as a guest, and then in his everyday role.

After “Stargate,” Shanks got to show some range by playing a pseudo-villain in the popular USA series “Burn Notice.” He played Victor, a rogue secret agent taking revenge on the shadowy intelligence agency that killed his family. He also recently landed a role that could bring him more into the mainstream by appearing in The CW’s “Smallville,” as comic book hero Hawkman. It’s still in the realm of sci-fi/fantasy, but the show has a wider following.

Still though, we can’t forget what Shanks and the “SG-1″ crew did in making the Sci-Fi/SyFy channel what it is today. A new Stargate show, “Stargate Universe” began this year, even as a rumoed “SG-1″ straight-to-DVD movie is on the shelf.

“Stargate Universe” is a much younger, more melodramatic, almost juvenile take on the franchise, and fans are conflicted. Shanks is too, even though he’s slated to appear in at least four episodes this season.

“It is really slick and pretty,” Shanks said. “[But] from what I’ve seen I’m not on board. … I’m not hooked in.”

Shanks said the drama and conflict seems forced. “They’re creating tension, pathos and angst,” he said. “The conflict with the characters seems a bit forced.”

One thing I did not dig deeply into was Shanks’ relationship with Christopher Judge. At the San Diego Comic-Con International in 2008, Judge boasted that he and Shanks started their own production company. We later heard about a production about the archangel Michael. But Shanks said the production company was off. He didn’t discuss his relationship with Judge, and I didn’t press him any further on the matter.

BLAST: So you and Christopher Judge are best buds. You have a production company you’re putting together? What’s happening with you guys?

MICHAEL SHANKS: Yeah. Let’s just say the production company’s not happening anymore, and I’d rather not go down that road and talk about Christopher Judge at this particular junction.

Shanks lives in Vancouver with his wife, the beautiful British-Filipina-Canadian actress Lexa Doig (Jason X), whom he got to work with when she played a doctor in 11 episodes at the end of “SG-1’s” running. She is also known for her sci-fi/fantasy work. The couple has two children, and Shanks has an 11-year-old Daughter, Tatiana, born in 1998 to then girlfriend Vaitiare Bandera, who played Daniel Jackson’s wife, Sha’re on “SG-1.” Shanks also said he’s been known to enjoy a good game of Hockey — like any true Canadian.

Editor’s note: After readers called out Blast — and called us liars — for not including the audio of the Christopher Judge portion of the Michael Shanks interview, we are posting it in the interest in full disclosure. We wouldn’t lie about or improperly quote an actor who agreed to give an interview to Blast.

I’m completely sincere when I say thank you, Tegan and Sara Quin, for writing songs that make me feel like my heart has been ripped out of my chest and pounded into a pulp on the pavement.”

The Canadian twins have always had an uncanny knack for making everyday, universal heartaches (”I imagine you, body next to another,” Tegan repeats on “The Ocean”) seem particularly poignant and profound, and that trend continues on “Sainthood,” their sixth full-length album, released today.

Musically, “Sainthood” doesn’t live up to the last Tegan & Sara album, 2007’s exceptional “The Con,” but the sisters continue their unparalleled lyrical examination of personal shortcomings, especially in relation to unrequited love.

The album’s title, culled from the Leonard Cohen lyric “I practiced all my sainthood / I gave to one and all / But the rumors of my virtue / They moved her not at all,” refers, according to the sisters, to their practice of being on their best behavior in the pursuit of relationships.

“All I said to you / All I did for you / Seems so silly to me now,” Tegan sings on “The Cure,” while Sara, on “Alligator,” promises herself, “No hissy fits / Mind my manners / Won’t make a scene / Oh, over you.”

From the jarring opening chords of the Sara-penned “Arrow” to Tegan’s hard-hitting “Northshore,” it’s clear that “Sainthood” is a musical leap for the duo. Sara, the quirkier of the two in terms of songwriting, penned the majority of the songs on “Sainthood,” and it shows. Tegan, meanwhile, seems to have absorbed the style of punk artists like Against Me! and AFI’s Hunter Burgan (who co-wrote three of the songs on “Sainthood”) she’s recently collaborated with.

Glaringly omitted from the record are tender acoustic ballads that were strong points on “The Con” and 2004’s “So Jealous.” Bonus track “Light Up,” Sara’s gorgeous homage to her mother, falls into this category, but though it’s included on the iTunes version of the album, it’s regrettable that it wasn’t included on the regular version (though, in fairness, it likely would have felt out of place).

With most of the 13 songs clocking in under three minutes, some feel unfinished, or even that they never had the chance to truly get off the ground in the first place. Album closer “Someday” seems particularly (and surprisingly) directionless.

At 29, the twins aren’t afraid to mock their own adolescent yearnings (”I know it turns you off when I get talkin’ like a teen,” Sara pines on the stellar “On Directing.”) Tegan & Sara joke that they are “committed to obsessively seek and discuss love until the end of time,” but all kidding aside, it’s a dialogue in which everyone can find solace.

Tegan & Sara play the Calvin Theatre in Northampton on February 12, 2010 and The Orpheum in Boston on February 13.

Let’s start with the shiny and fun stuff: Uncharted 2 has the most impressive graphics I’ve ever seen on a console game. If that sounds like hyperbole, then you haven’t seen Uncharted 2 in action, so quit your whining and go find out for yourself before you contradict me. Animations are fluid and realistic. The environments, which were part of what drew people to the original game in the first place, are brighter, colorful, and just feel alive. There are parts of this game that approach photo realistic, and the cutscenes use the in-game engine (Naughty Dog Engine 2.0, an upgraded version) to tell the game’s story–the seamless transitions between cutscenes and in-game events is impressive, to say the least.

The music in the game is wonderful in its ambient nature, rising and falling at all of the right times to increase tension and keep you focused on the game world. Sound effects are satisfying to hear–explosions, gun fire, the chatter of Nathan Drake as he rolls away from grenades or pops a guy in the head with a shot. Most wonderful is the voice acting though–the writing and acting are of such high quality that the game is almost as entertaining to watch as it is to play. Nathan is a lovable lead, but the supporting cast is just as entertaining–old favorites in Sully and Elena return, along with newbies like Harry Flynn and Chloe, two characters who have a history with Nate that are with you through various means throughout the adventure.

The story is well done (just like in the first game) so even if you begin to tire of shooting from behind cover at your enemies, you will want to keep playing to hear that next line or see the tale unfold. I won’t spoil a thing for you, but the game begins in the midst of the action, with Drake falling out of a train car that’s suspending from a snowy mountain. Flashbacks bring you into the past, and you play your way right back to the scene after a significant number of hours. It’s a neat mechanic that is not seen very often in games, and it worked to great effect here as you re-lived the events of Drake’s life leading up to his being half-dead in the snow.

Uncharted 2’s gameplay is split into three distinct sections: platforming, puzzles, and shooting. The puzzles in this sequel are improved from the first–they aren’t as painfully obvious, and you now get to flip through a few pages of your journal at a time in order to figure out just where Nate has seen this puzzle before. They are still simple though, but enjoyable to solve. The platforming is the more significant part of the gameplay, as you will spend a huge chunk of your time in Uncharted 2 climbing, jumping, and trying your best not to look down. Climbing isn’t as easy as it was in say, inFAMOUS, where you automatically latch on to everything, but that’s because there are more specific paths for Drake and company in this game than in that one starring a super powered protagonist. Climbing is satisfying, and sometimes finding the right path is a puzzle unto itself–a more challenging one than the actual puzzles at times. There’s a hint system in place if you take too long, and you can press up on the D-pad when notified one is available to see it. It’s helpful, especially your first time through the game, as it just points you in the right direction without actively telling you what needs to be done.

You’ll spend more time shooting than anything in Uncharted 2, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. Luckily, the controls are tighter, and for this reason you’ll have much more fun blasting away mercenaries than you did in the original. For one, grenades are now thrown by holding L2 to create a throwing arc, and then releasing it to toss your grenade. Need a quick explosion? Naughty Dog’s got you covered there too, as you can now blind fire a grenade using your reticule as a quick and dirty guide; hold L1 and press L2 to fire your grenades this way. I use this more often than the more accurate system, just because there isn’t always time to setup a grenade lob. Plus, it’s a hand grenade, and almost counts here; you don’t need to be spot on with each one to do damage.

There will be some spoilers in the podcast. Click at your own risk.

Now that the movie has been shown to fans, we can finally sit down and talk about it.

I saw “Boondock Saints II” last week. I liked it.

I didn’t like it in the way that I’m a news editor and occasional film critic. I didn’t love it in the way that I’m an artist and I can appreciate a classic piece of film.

Let’s face it, there’s two kinds of people in the world: The ones that love “The Boondock Saints” and the ones who hate “The Boondock Saints.”

And I love “The Boondock Saints.”

Shit, I put it on the cover. But I’m not a damn fanboy. I’m not a fanboy about anything. In fact, the more I like something, the harder I tend to be on the people in charge. You can ask the people at Sony when PlayStation 3 first came out, and you can ask Boondock writer/director Troy Duffy, because I changed the pace on Monday and asked him some pointed questions.

What you’re going to hear in the podcast on the top of this article is my session on one of a series of roundtable interviews that Duffy and actors Sean Patrick Flanery, Norman Reedus, and Billy Connolly put on at The Black Rose bar in downtown Boston. We had a good time and we laughed throughout most of the 20-minute session, but I was on a mission to bring home some data for this piece of our month-long coverage on the sequel, “All Saints Day.” But, besides that, the podcast is mostly hilariousness and gay jokes.

“It was just like riding a bicycle,” Duffy said about his return to directing.

“He sucked equally on this one as he did in the first one,” Flanery added after a pause, laughing.

But return it is. Duffy made Boondock in 1999 and hasn’t made a film since. He was a young director coming out to Hollywood, and he made some mistakes — and I’m probably being nice here. But he still managed to make a good movie amidst it all.

“They talk about Troy as a new director, but from day one it looks as if he was doing it his whole life,” Connolly said.

Just as people either love or hate Boondock, they either love or hate Duffy. (The Documentary “Overnight” really hurt him too)

The people in the original movie seem to be loyalists. Nearly everybody — including someone you don’t expect (it’s in the podcast) — is back for the sequel.

“Everything just happened,” Connolly said. “Everybody seemed to be there for the love of the piece, not just to be in a movie or earn some money.”

It showed. When you listen to the podcast and check out our other interviews, you’ll hear how good of a time they all had making both movies.

Boondock is an organic cult success, and the cast and crew know it.

“Half of Boondock was one guy sitting another guy down going ‘you’re watching this movie,’” Duffy said.

Will there be a third movie?

“Lets just ride this one into the shore and see what happens,” Duffy said. “I got some ideas.”

It’s also up to the studio and the fans. If the sequel makes money in theaters, I say bet on a trilogy.

At the end, I asked Duffy what we could expect from him going forward.

“During that 10-year period, I have written a bunch of scripts,” he said, “and I intend to knock them down like dominoes one by one. They’re in ascending budgets, all different stories. One is a period piece, a buddy comedy, a black comedy, one is about serial killers, one is called “The Peregrines” which would take me an hour to describe what the’s about, one is about a historical figure, which will take a lot of money to do that last one.”

The four guys also toured Boston College and Emerson College before premiering the movie for fans on Monday night. Here’s a vid from their day:

“Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day” is in theaters October 30.

This is a fantasy RPG, but you are not some kind of powered-up super soldier that swings a sword larger than they are to cleave through any foe. Nor are you some kind of dexterous, agile creature that can run and jump without tiring, avoiding the blows of the enemies around you. You’re a regular person with regular weapons and you can (and will) bleed. And you will die. You think that giant axe looks awesome? You’re probably only strong enough to swing it if you use two hands, which means you can’t use a shield. No problem, right? You’re sure to cut through anything in your path with it. Well, assuming you can swing it often anyways—which you can’t, given its heft and the energy required to swing it once. You power up as you play (more on that later) but you can’t just start off as a force to be reckoned with. You have to earn that through the lessons the game attempts to impart on you, but this learning process is part of what should draw you into the world of Demon’s Souls to begin with.

Here’s the story in non-spoiler form: you’ve come to Boletaria to either save the world from the demons or use their power for your own ends, but either way some demons are going to pay. You can pick from a variety of classes, all with their own strengths, weaknesses and strategies for playing. Want to overpower your foes? Become a knight, fully decked out in an armor suit. Maybe you want a bit more movement—become a soldier with lighter plate armor, but less strength and protection. Maybe you want to attack from a distance with a bow (Hunter) or spells—that last category has multiple options all its own. You have to approach each situation differently depending on your class, but there’s no wrong answer. You just have to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each class—they will become apparent to you soon enough—as you progress through the game, or else there will be no progression for you.

You attack with your primary weapon using R1, and utilize strong attacks with R2. You can equip a secondary weapon on the same hand if you want a sword/spear combination or something like that, and in your other hand you can carry a shield or another weapon, like a crossbow, bow or wand for magic. You run by holding down the Circle button, and you can also roll and take a quick step back using the Circle and a direction on the left stick. Items are used with the Square button, and your on-hand items are rotated using down on the directional pad. The controls are easy to use once you get used to where everything is.

Just like many of today’s RPGs, you have to deal with inventory and equip weight; too much on hand means you won’t be able to show off your agile rolling and running effectively, so be mindful of this. Unlike many of today’s RPGs, there is no pause button, so you can’t just hit pause and equip a more powerful weapon or heal yourself while a bad guy tries to lop your head off. Always be prepared is right up there with any other personal rule you can come up with for surviving Demon’s Souls.

On their Beginnings

Mikel Jollett formed Airborne in 2006. Spurred by personal catastrophic events in his life Jollet turned from writing about music and started to make his own.

“I realized I was composing an album instead of a novel,” he told the Los Angeles Times in August of 2007.

He recruited some of his friends: Steven Chen on guitar, Noah Harmon on bass, Daren Taylor on drums, and Anna Bulbrook on viola keyboards and tambourine.

Less than a month later the band played its first show in Echo Park. Jollett had been keeping busy contacting bloggers and getting word out their about the band and their first concert. Jollett sent MP3s to blogs, and the bloggers started writing. “When it came to that first show, they were all there,” Chen said. Jollett remembers about 200 showing up, which is impressive for a first show.

October 5 is the anniversary of their first show Chen remembers, “and we completely forgot about it this year,” he said. Before that first show Chen had only met Harmon one or two times. “He was still on the fence (about joining the band) at that point,” Chen said.

“I’m still on the fence now three years later,” Harmon interrupted laughing.

On the Band

“We all bring something different, something new to the mix,” Chen said. Before turning to writing Jollett was a freelancer for National Public Radio and the Los Angeles Times and worked on a few novels. Bulbrook is a classically trained violinist and upon joining the band taught herself to play the viola and the keyboard. Harmon holds a jazz degree in upright bass and worked as a music teacher in LA for a few years. Chen was asked to join as a keyboardist, but petitioned to be lead guitarist.

“Anna and her viola bring something different,” Harmon agreed. String instruments are rare and few between in rock bands, and when they do appear it’s nine times out of ten a violin.

“It’s a rock and roll viola,” Harmon said, “The poor thing never knew what it was getting into.”

“Our goal, whether it be a slower song like ‘Midnight’ or a more upbeat song like ‘Gasoline’ is to write a good song and strike some chord,” Chen said. “That was the whole idea for the album.”

As for the name, it was all Jollett’s idea. Taken from Don DeLillo’s novel ‘White Noise,’ an airborne toxic event was a term coined by the military to reference a poisonous cloud emitted from a chemical spill.

“I had read the book for three classes and wrote two essays on it,” Chen said, “as the title it makes a lot of sense.”

“It doesn’t matter at all what you call yourself,” Chen said. “It’s what you do with it.”

On the Tour

“We’re just a new band,” Jollett said to the audience, “the world’s coming by us at 100 miles a minute and I don’t think any of us can make heads or tails of it.”

Airborne has played more than 250 shows this year, and the year is far from over. The band members cannot remember the last time they were home for more than a month.

“When I go home I don’t even bother putting things away,” Chen laughed. Instead he just lives easily out of a suitcase. Harmon sold his car when he realized it was doing little more than gathering dust.

“Your idea of home becomes a bit skewed,” Harmon added, “now home is a tour bus.”

Chen cannot even picture home anymore: “I can’t imagine not being in a new place every night.”

Airborne will take a nice long break around the holiday time and then jet off to the UK and beyond.

It will be their sixth time in UK this year.

“I’ve landed in London as many times as I’ve landed in Los Angeles,” Harmon laughed.

For Harmon, the UK is one of their favorite destinations, and they’ve been there six times this year. “But in the UK the fridges don’t work,” Chen butted in, “but it’s really ok because they know their fridges don’t work. They’re not trying to convince anyone that the refrigerator works.”

On “Sometime Around Midnight”

The viola starts and the crowd screams at its loudest. Everyone knows what songs coming before one bow stroke is over. It may only be 10:58 by my clock, but for Airborne Toxic Event it’s “Sometime Around Midnight.”

An acoustic version of the song was released as a free Starbucks song of the week, and from there it grew popularity on both iTunes and the music charts.

It’s not that big of a deal when your friends know who you are, when your friends-friends know who you are Chen said. “It’s when your parents friends start to notice, it’s like whoa.”

People relate to the emotions in it, Harmon comments. The record became an instant hit. Not only a top radio and music video track, iTunes also named it the “Number 1 Alternative Song of 2008.”

On Boston and the House of Blues

Now that the Red Sox season is officially over, the gem of Landsdowne has moved across the street to House of Blues. And here the players are musicians and they wear red basketball shorts and converse instead of cleats and baseball tights. “We just played the most intense game of basketball ever,” bassist Noah Harmon said, pulling his hair back. “I don’t remember the last time I was so winded.”

Two opening bands, and two hours into the night Airborne finally hits the stage. And they hit it running. For a impressive few minutes they all go a bit crazy and show off their raw talent. No vocals, no lights, just Airborne and their respective instruments. Before you know it the first song has started, and you are transfixed in a daze.

On stage they show undeniable togetherness and energy, even as the set pushes upon two hours. They bounce off each other’s backs, Bulbrook wields her viola, Harmon sporadically strokes a bow on his bass strings, Taylor hacks away with his drum sticks, Jollett spasms, and Chen stands tall and unmoving. But somehow it all works.

One of the most impressive parts of the set was an acoustic set. Jollett sat down on the stage and sang to the audience more personally, Chen went to an upright piano, and Harmon picked up a jazz bass. “I feel like we’re getting to know you now,” Jollett told the crowd.

“You were the audience, Boston, and we were the band,” Jollett ended after a four song encore. “One day, when your dead you’re one wish is gonna be for this hour and a half back, but thank you for it.”

But Jollett’s words were wrong, as the crowd’s one wish was that the night never ended.

BlastMagazine.com is proud to be sponsoring the Faulkner-Sagoff RUNWAY Gala on October 22 at the InterCOntinental Hotel here in Boston.

The RUNWAY Gala is a night of fashion and fundraising for one of the best causes of all — breast cancer care. So cue the music, lower the house lights, and join Blast as we are very proud to cover and be a part of a night of fashion supporting the Faulkner Hospital Faulker-Sagoff Centre.

Presented by Suffolk Healthcare, this exciting event will preview the works of Boston’s hottest up and coming young designers from the School of Fashion Design. Guests will vote for their favorite alongside celebrity judges, including TLC’s “A Makeover Story” coach Gretchen Monahan, “Project Runway” alums Emmett McCarthy and Kevin Christiana, jewelry designer Tonya Chen Mezrich and Boldfacers.com founder Lisa Pierpont.

The evening will honor Men with Heart, a group of men committed to fighting breast cancer. They are husbands, sons, fathers and brothers of women touched by breast cancer.

The Faulkner-Sagoff Breast Imaging and Diagnostic Centre provides a patient-centered approach to breast cancer detection and prevention, making it one of the leading centers for breast health care in New England and in the country. In the decades since its establishment in 1971, the Centre has cared for well over 100,000 women.

For even more information on the event, visit Faulkner Hospital’s website.

"Motherhood" starring Uma Thurman

It’s just one day in the life of Eliza Welch — a mother of two, former writer and chronic blogger.

It seems simple enough on the surface. Today, she needs to get her daughter to school, take care of her toddler son, blog and prepare for her daughter’s sixth birthday party, along with a list of other errands. Then, she decides to enter a contest for a parenting magazine: 500 words on what motherhood means to her.

Now it’s not so simple. Adding to the chaos is the fact that she lives in a tenement walk-up in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Not only is there an endless line of physical obstacles, like a towed car, there is an endless sea of people ready and willing to criticize her.

It all culminates in a breakdown. The once promising, creative and inspired writer fears she’s lost herself in motherhood.

“Motherhood is a thing that can be terribly under-appreciated,” said Uma Thurman, who plays Eliza, in a recent interview with Blast. Even mothers themselves deride their own job, she said.

And that’s just why director and writer Katherine Dieckmann wrote “Motherhood.” The experience doesn’t parallel any of the usual extremes. It’s not “Leave it to Beaver,” nor is it “Mommie Dearest.” It’s a continuous barrage of larger problems, mindless minutia and judgmental by-standers; all of which can quickly make an intelligent, creative woman question herself.

“I wrote it because I was very frustrated with the absence of movies about mothers,” said Dieckmann. “What is motherhood really like? What happens to a woman’s psyche and sense of self?”

For Thurman, also a New Yorker and mother of two in a creative industry, Eliza’s story is familiar.

“I felt very moved and much related to Katherine’s writing,” she said. “I relate to (Eliza) as a character in many ways. I’ve had that day, in my own way.”

And almost as important as Eliza are the people that surround her. Avery, her husband played by Anthony Edwards, quietly endures an unfulfilling job to bring in money. Sheila, her best friend played by Minnie Driver, is the single, sex deprived mom who becomes the unwilling subject of a blog entry. Then there are the other mothers – the wealthy snob mom, the over attentive mom, the slightly crazy new-age mom and more – all ready to offer their opinions and judgments without being asked.

“People like to lecture mothers,” Dieckmann said. “And it’s just like, fuck you.”

Even the 20-something guy in the party store and some old ladies on the street had rude lectures to dole out.

“It’s amazing how liberal people are in criticizing mothers,” Thurman said.

New York itself becomes a problematic character too. Streets crowded with tourists, a film crew, heavy traffic and tenement living all make Eliza’s day even harder. That’s why, Dieckmann said, she chose the city as her setting. Suburbia just doesn’t present as many challenges. Your life is planned differently and ordinary tasks become more difficult.

“There’s something about the peculiarity of life in New York,” she said.

“Motherhood” doesn’t glorify its heroine, though. Eliza isn’t always right. As Thurman put it, “She’s trapped in her bubble.”

Eliza begins to face doubts about her parenting skills, her marriage and her creative self as she tries to answer the question, “What does motherhood mean to you?”

“She sort of agrees with the deriding of her own job,” Thurman said, thinking about a particular scene. “Is it important? Do I have anything to say? Am I just another mother in this park?”

And that’s the central theme of “Motherhood.” How does a mother successfully raise children while maintaining a sense of self? What happens to passion and creativity when all she can focus on are physical daily tasks? It’s a delicate, difficult balance.

So what does motherhood mean to Thurman?

“Growing up.”

“Motherhood” opens in theaters October 23.

Finally, there is the issue of Tilly’s brother, Grady Funk, portrayed by David Koechner, who some fans may recognize from NBC’s “The Office” and most recently the film “Extract,”

As one of the final sets Blast visited in Burbank recently, we caught glimpses of a few scenes being shot before we sat down with Grammer, McGraw and Koechner to discuss the show.

The first question we had to ask the cast was: What brought them all together for this project?

“For the last year or so I was thinking about returning to television again, and trying another shot after ‘Back to You,’” said Grammer. “I looked at television and thought to myself, the only thing missing in television these days is the traditional family show that has everyone living together, mother, father, and the kids, you know? Then I met Tucker (Cawley) and he had this loosely phrased idea about a guy who had fallen down from a big perch and was moving down to Virginia.”

Blast was able to see the final pilot episode shortly before our meeting, and we wondered if the physical comedy aside from the witty dialogue would be part of its style.

“Melinda’s stuff is high farce. This week we shot some things in the woods,” Grammer laughed.

“I think a lot of the behavior just ends up physical,” McGraw added. “So, a lot of times if it’s not written in, if it becomes physical because of how we are covering for ourselves and each other. I think there’s a lot fun stuff, and there’s some things that are a little broad.”

We may just see a bit more into Tilly’s side of the family, whose southern roots brought them to Virginia in the first place.

“Well we get (Grady’s wife) and a couple of kids. I don’t know how many.” Grammer said. He also explained more about the relationship Hank has with his brother-in-law, Grady, a man who has no problem reminding Hank of the reasons he’s in Virigina.

“This relationship will be to always antagonize one another,” Grammer said. “And she secretly is a party to it all because he and she are brother and sister. But the key relationships are here (in the pilot).”

“So far we’re exploring the world of the family, the extended family,” said Koechner, “and then probably the town, and the state, and the nation.”

And what of the kids on the show? In the pilot, Maddie clearly has her issues with daddy, and a boyfriend of sorts. “Oh we’ll be dealing with the boyfriends, I mean she’s only 17,” said Grammer emphasizing the plural.

“What’s great is that it’s a modern father daughter relationship. It’s not one of the corny ones that doesn’t exist,” Koechner added, saying that, these days, teenagers go through things much faster than a decade ago.

“There are real moments, and hopefully in the end everyone is going to grow up a little,” said Grammer. “They’ve had one life they thought was pretty well set, and it changed. That throws everyone into a tailspin.”

“And it was a rare existence that you don’t really have,” McGraw chimed in, “and I do think an interesting dynamic in the triangle (between Hank, Grady, and Tilly) is that in-between them, I might come back to her old ways. Throw back a couple of beers with Grady. Or I’ll push against them. Hank has that American (perspective) of starting from nothing and making something new, kind of pulling up by your bootstraps. And the realities of how those ‘bootstraps’ are different than twenty years ago.”

We closed by asking the trio to tell viewers why they should watch “Hank” this fall.

“I think the show has an identifiable character that everyone can relate to, that’s just like so and so,” said Koechner. “And it’ll definitely get people to laugh. It comes from a place of honesty and truth. It’s not just manufactured. The writing is good, and makes me laugh out loud. And finally, well, I just love Kelsey Grammer!”

“Oh, I can’t fight with that!” Grammer replied.

“I think it’s a relief to watch a show where you see people going through such changes because it makes you feel like you’re not the only ones,” McGraw added.

“And this is a show, the whole family can watch it, and it’s not a kid’s kind of show.” said Koechner.

“For years, I’ve heard people tell me that Hollywood doesn’t make shows for (the family) anymore,” Grammer said, “and this year, Hollywood does.”

Catch Grammer, McGraw, Koechner and all of “Hank” every Wednesday at 8 p.m. on ABC.

“Everyone’s ready for something a little different,” commented Fashion Boston editor Alexandara Hall. “Boston fashion is more than Uggs and umbrellas.”

Macy’s celebrated fashion week Tuesday night by hosting Fashion Group International of Boston and the Launch Designers. Spectators sipped on cocktails as models stood on platforms and a DJ blasted top 40 remixes over the speakers.

“It’s a really nice way to experience fashion,” commented spectator Karen English, an Emerson College student. “Usually at a show you cant get that up and personal to the pieces. The model walks past you and bam they’re done, that’s all you get to see.”

Guests had a chance to walk up to the models, ask them to turn, actually touch the clothing. The designers were also standing close-by and available for any discussion of their collection.

The Launch Designers was a group of five up and coming designers in Boston, handpicked by FGI.

Millie Bautista of the Dominican Republic showcased a line inspired by everyday upscale fashion with tiny details to make you drool.

Paulina Gilson drew her inspiration for her impressive silhouette of jackets from a castle in her native Czech Republic. “The architecture, and how everything works together. I feel like it just clicks,” she said. For Gilson fashion is about a balance. “It’s not overpowering. It’s wearable.”

Eddie Phillips of Southbridge had designed a more simple collection of cocktail wear. “I like things simple,” said the former accountant. With clean lines, and astounding texture, his collection is far from ordinary.

Nara Paz started out as a bathing suit designer in Brazil. After moving to America she had different hopes and dreams, “I want to move to the high end of the market. I want it to be more than a dress, to me fashion is a piece of art.” With her dramatic use of colors, sharp attention to detail, and innovative shapes, Paz has definitely created her own pieces of art for the human form.

Elena Sanders of Watertown showcased her line of “steampunk.” Sanders was inspired by Victorian-era steam powered technology, and the coal-stained faces of the workers. WIth a variety of different textures and materials, lots of metal and gears, her pieces look like a bit like costumes. “But it’s a lot more than your Halloween costume,” Sanders defends. It’s the kind of costume you’d be intrigued by for hours, and takes a creative ingenious mind to create.

“This provides a great opportunity for new talent to be featured and kick-start their businesses,” commented Jay Calderin, Executive Director of Boston Fashion Week.

Jesse Eisenberg, who is swiftly dominating the “geeky-and-smart-yet-adorable-and-funny male lead” category in Hollywood, plays, you guessed it, the geeky and smart, yet, oh-so-hilarious-and-adorable male lead in “Zombieland.” And he seemingly can play that role so well because of personal experience. Throughout the interview, he stumbled and revved over his words like speed bumps, liberally inserting “like” and “y’know” and occasionally dropping a word like “pratfall,” and rushed on while I stayed back and tried to define the word by context. But you see why girls drop like flies for him when, after making a wry, witty comment, he flashes those dimples for which his younger sister, Hallie Kate Eisenberg, is more famous. (Remember the little Pepsi girl?)

Harrelson and Eisenberg spent a lot of time talking about how hard they’ve worked on this film, which is not, they protest, the next “Shaun of the Dead.” But as they spent most of the interview hurling comedic one-liners at each other, laughing in their own world at things I couldn’t understand, it became apparent that being funny isn’t hard work for them.

“I take (my role) three-quarters seriously,” Harrelson said.

“Yeah, like most of your work,” Eisenberg shot back without missing a beat.

This chemistry, which is as natural in the movie as it is in person, was apparently developed a lot on set.

“The fun things to film,” Eisenberg said, “are, you know, improvising with like, Woody, that’s like, amazingly fun, we would be improvising for, like, several minutes, and we’d all end up laughing and he would just stare at us in character like ‘Why are you laughing at me?’ Like that look he was just giving me now as I was explaining it.”

Harrelson, quick to return the compliment, talked about the scene where his and Eisenberg’s characters meet.

“This is the last take,” Harrelson said, “and then he says ‘Oh, one and done, I always say. I mean, I said it once.’ It’s like, really clever! Or, ‘Hey watch out, you almost knocked over your alcohol with your knife.’ Things that I couldn’t have known that was gonna be funny. There’s a lot of that stuff.”

Unfortunately for us, however, Eisenberg said much of the improv won’t make it into the movie.

“They’re usually so absurd,” he said, “cause they’re just actors trying to make each other laugh, not the characters actually speaking. Uh, yeah, there was a lot of… pratfalls.”

So, perhaps the hard work they’re talking about is running from zombies for hours at a time.

“I mean, it’s difficult to make,” Eisenberg said. “Like, a little fight scene that is, like, 30 seconds, takes a long time to film and, like, a lot of preparation and, you know, you’re running all night and whatever. You have fake blood and puke on you and… it’s, like, really fun to watch, but you know, definitely the least fun thing to film.”

Although “Zombieland” isn’t marketed as a horror film, it doesn’t spare the blood. Director Ruben Fleischer’s zombies aren’t the typical plodding-with-arms-outstretched zombies. In fact, they’re quite fast, and incredibly persistent. Viewers get the opportunity to see a mother get run down in a minivan by her own toddler zombie daughter. The scene ends with you watching mom slide face-first for ten feet on hot asphalt.

A lot of the carnage got thrown in post-production, Eisenberg said.

“(Fleischer) just became desensitized,” Eisenberg said. “When you edit a movie and you’re sitting there for just days and days and days… he would just stop seeing the blood splatter and they’d end up just putting more in. and now… the whole movie’s just… like sepia-toned.”

When audiences go to see “Zombieland” this Friday, many will be holding it up in comparison to the similar 2004 flick “Shaun of the Dead.” Eisenberg and Harrelson insisted, however, that the films aren’t comparable.

“We’re not a competition,” Harrelson said.

Eisenberg felt a little more strongly about the comparison. He had this to say to those who are critical of “Zombieland:”

“You don’t want to see my movie? Fuck off,” he said, laughing. “I worked so hard on this! If you don’t want to go because there was another movie ten years ago that had a slightly similar tone… It’s one of the funniest movies you’ll ever see ever. The zombies are, like, almost secondary. So if you don’t want to go see it because you’re, uh, precious about the genre, or whatever, fuck off.”

The film, which actually started out as a television show, definitely lends itself to having a sequel. If it does as well as expected, that very well may be a possibility. The end leaves us wanting to see what happens to our post-zombie-apocalypse characters. Does Columbus come up with more rules to live by? What other shenanigans do he and Tallahassee get themselves into?

“The moment (’Zombieland’) ended,” Eisenberg said, “I was like ‘We gotta do another one tomorrow!’ It’s so much fun to watch. You want to see another one. You want to see like more rules. You want to see, like, what these people are gonna do. Like, it’s just the most fun experience.”

Look tomorrow for our review of “Zombieland,” which comes out October 2.

Photo credit: Blast staff photo/Aram Boghosian

The plot surrounds 2 minutes and 17 seconds, when people all over the world inexplicably experience a power blackout at once. As if things were not eerie enough, survivors of the event discover they have caught glimpses into their own futures, a flashforward. With such such a dramatic and mysterious start, it’s easy for someone to label it offhandedly as a sci-fi series, when in fact the only really surreal element is the blackout itself. After previewing the pilot earlier this summer, it became clear that the driving force will be how individual people take charge in shaping the future. Will some of them fulfill their futuristic visions? Or will some change it?

After the debut of the series, there is no doubt that most viewers will be asking the same questions.

After a series of set visits, our meet up with the cast of “FlashForward” took a different spin. Upon arrival we immediately crossed the threshold of what is the interior of the federal building. The set is impeccable and very see-through, as glass windows encircle the room leaving little room for hiding out.

We sat in a tucked away office on set with Courtney B. Vance (Stan Wedeck) and Christine Woods (Janis Hawk). Both actors said they were excited about the new series.

The cast also includes Dominic Monaghan (”Lost,” “The Lord of the Rings”), John Cho (Harold from the “Harold and Kumar” movies), Sonya Walger (”Lost”), Genevieve Cortese (”Wildfire”) and Jack Davenport (”Swingtown,” the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies). The series is produced by Marc Guggenheim, David Goyer, and Brannon Braga.

We wondered how each character’s “flash” would play out.

Courtney B. Vance stars in FlashForward (Blast staff photo/Conception Allen)

Woods added, “And it’s interesting because, as an audience, for some flashes, you know what’s going on. You’ve seen the flash, and it’s interesting to watch the way they are or are not forthcoming to other (characters). It’s like you get to watch some people lie about it, but as an audience you know.”

And while both actors may not always know what to expect for their characters, they conveyed to us their thoughts about it.

“Well, you can’t prepare for what you don’t know, really.” Vance said.

“For me, I kind of like not knowing because in that way you can be in the moment. To not have these (expectations),” said Woods.

When we asked further about working with an ensemble, and whether characters’ storylines overlap at some point, it was interesting to find that for their roles, they’re spread out a bit more.

“Are you in this episode?” Vance turned to ask his co-star.

“I’m in episode eight.” Woods replied.

“Yeah, see I’m in episode seven and eight. I was crazy in episode five, and a little in six.

So I relish the idea that there will be some times when we’ll be absolutely crazy. And since we’re doing two or three at a time (episodes), it’s especially crazy on all of us.” Vance concluded.

“And I think because it’s two episodes (filming) at once, I think it’s a lot easier for them to keep secrets from us,” Woods said. “Because it’s such a puzzle, the way that they shoot the series with so many people, you look at the schedule and it’s confusing. Even if you’ve read the script.”

Vance added, “On top of the fact we may be shooting one, and reshooting another one. So continuity wise, it’s hard trying to get a sense. On Thursday we were shooting four and five, then reshooting five and six. So it’s just crazy.”

Vance with Woods (Blast staff photo/Conception Allen)

For the cast of “FlashForward,” it’s easy to see the friendly vibes among them are mutual, where big egos don’t seem prevalent. As a veteran on stage, and recently part of “Law and Order: Criminal Intent,” we asked how Vance felt taking up the role of FBI handler Stan Wedeck, another character in law enforcement.

“For me it’s different because in ‘Law and Order’ there was no characterization. You’re just the facts man. This is refreshing because we’re all (together), and we’re all involved,” Vance said.

“And we are all so personal,” Woods said. “We take it to the personal side of things because it is really a mystery show, an investigative show. These people are what essentially make it.”

While the hype is still out there about the series and fans anticipate its premiere, Blast says the show is much more than a sci-fi series. FlashForward is more about the human elements that make you care about those characters onscreen.

This is the first of our two part feature covering “Flash Forward”. Coming up, more details about the series after the pilot from the series producers, plus more with Courtney B. Vance and Kristine Woods and our interview with Joseph Fiennes.

“I’m just not one of those people that can sort of watch everything happen and be off in La La Land daydreaming about something else,” Barrymore said in her recent interview with Blast while she was in Boston.

She explained shy she has finally taken her seat in the director’s chair after a lifetime of acting and 15 years of producing. “I wanted to do it when I felt like I was really ready and really understood how filmmaking works on every single level that I possibly could.”

Whip It, in theaters October 2, stars Ellen Page as a Texas teenager who finds an outlet from her loathed life of pageantry in the world of women’s roller derby.

Barrymore took a risk in choosing a movie about a relatively unknown sport — that even she knew almost nothing about — as her directorial debut.

“I love to see girls do what boys do, especially not male bash while they do it,” she said.

Barrymore said it was important to her to create a movie that encourages women and girls to go after their goals. “Take from your inspirations, but don’t imitate them. Become your own individual,” she said.

Clearly she has no problem inspiring women, herself. “And still (directing is) the biggest challenge and, you know, it’s gonna knock you sideways on a daily basis no matter how prepared you think you are,” she said.

And boy was she prepared. Barrymore, along with Page and co-stars Kristen Wiig and Juliette Lewis, spent painstaking hours learning to skate and getting in shape for their many rides around the rink.

“You bond and you injure yourself together and cheer each other on to get it right or to celebrate when you learn a new trick,” Barrymore said.

Now she’s practically a pro. Though her role in the movie, as badass derby girl Smashlee Simpson, is fairly small, it’s obvious that she sank her teeth into her role as both actress and director, taking it upon herself to learn everything she possibly could about roller derby. “The game is real, the girls are amazing,” she said. “They’re these great little tribes. There’s great competitiveness and capability and athleticism.”

Another reason she was drawn to the sport was its propensity to include people from all walks of life. “I also think that it’s a very welcoming sport in that you can be any age or size or ethnicity or economical background and it’s a very come one come all, open hearted sport and party and I like that.”

Derby certainly does look like a party, with an always excited crowd and hot girls in tiny outfits swearing at each other and getting in fights. But did Barrymore portray roller derby realistically? “The only intention I had was to celebrate it and allow people to be let in on something if they don’t know about it and celebrate the people who are involved in it,” she said. “I honored the derby world entirely.”

As for the critics? “You can’t please everybody so you’ve gotta get over that, like, as soon as you come out of the womb,” she said.

No she can’t please everybody, but she can sure try. And try. “I’m sort of surprised when people go, like, ‘why did you want to direct’ or ‘do you think you’ll direct again.’ I’m like, ‘Do you know me?’ I’m film obsessed. I do nothing but work. I wish I had more of a social life,” admits the workaholic.

Barrymore is unabashedly proud of her movie, but modest in a decidedly un-Hollywood way. “I think you don’t have to be a certain age or gender in order to be a storyteller. I think you have to risk being personal and exposing yourself and investing in your characters and driving great performances out of people,” she said.

She is also proud of the real-life derby girls who are able to kick-ass on and off the rink. “What these girls do is have these great little alter egos and they’re one thing by day and another thing by night,” she said.

So does Barrymore have an alter ego? If you remember her stripping on Lettermen’s desk and partying all night long, you may think so. But in reality, Barrymore has grown into an inspiring woman.

“’Be your own hero’ is the tag of our movie and that’s a big theme for me in life,” she said. “I just think you have to be your own little hero.”

But Gorki Aguila is no ordinary musician. He is Cuban-born. He has been jailed twice in his country for his music and political beliefs. Along with a number of musicians in Cuba and elsewhere, the songs his band Porno para Ricardo (Porn for Richard) plays are politically motivated. But, unlike his contemporaries in other countries, who are free to express their opinions through their music, Aguila is paying a harsh price for his views against the Castro regime in Cuba.

Living in Mexico since April 2008, Aguila knows that the political views expressed in his music are considered controversial by the Cuban government. His outspoken tendencies first got him arrested six years ago on what he claims were trumped up drug charges. At the time, because he refused to sign a document the government presented to him stating he would renounce his views, he spent a little more than two years in jail.

“It’s time to call things by name. The bad in our country has a name: It’s called Fidel Castro. It’s called Raul Castro,” Aguila has said, undeterred as to the consequences of his outspoken views.

A campaign poster for Bloggers United for Cuban Liberty after Aguila was arrested last year

His latest arrest came in August 2008, followed by a trial that lasted for two hours, in which he was convicted of “public disorder.” He was fined $28, the equivalent of two months’ salary in Cuba but acquitted of the more serious charge of “social dangerousness” — a vague charge that the Cuban government is known to throw out frequently against dissidents in Cuba.

Porno para Ricardo formed in 1998, and has continued to mock and attack the Castro regime. Because the band is not allowed to play openly in Cuba, it has been limited to performing and recording its songs in warehouses or private homes.

Though the government’s stance on Aguila and his band is well-known, the band’s followers willingly risk arrest and imprisonment to listen to them. Despite the danger involved, “Porno” continues to be known and admired by a small but dedicated following on the communist island, a following that is beginning to grow. Perhaps it is that by supporting Aguila, his fans are able to express their discontent with the oppressive Cuban regime.

Despite his obvious political stance in opposing the Castro regime, Aguila is vocal about his wishes regarding returning to Cuba. He has a personal motivation — his 13-year-old daughter still lives on the island.

“I want to return,” he said. But, the reality is that may not be possible. Aguila said that the only reason he would be denied re-entry would be because the government feared him.

At the same time that Aguila is making his US tour, rocker Juanes put on a major concert of his own in Havana, called Peace Without Borders. Porno para Ricardo has been banned from ever playing on Cuban soil or being heard on Cuban airwaves, but Juanes still unsuccessfully requested for Aguila to play at his international peace concert. The concert took place on Sunday in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolucion, an enormous plaza where the government sponsors events (a gigantic picture of Che Guevara peers down from a building bordering the square). Sixteen artists from six countries performed — including a couple of Cuban ones like Silvio Rodriguez, one of Fidel’s favorite singers.

Although several offered to perform, no Cuban exile musicians were invited to participate, flying in the face of peace, transparency, and openness.

Before the concert took place, Juanes kept insisting that the event was not going to be political, that is was all about peace. He learned soon enough that in Cuba nothing can be “not political,” when he found out that he was being spied upon by government agents — his every move monitored and reported on (something that Cuban citizens live with every day). Juanes was so furious that he threatened to call off the concert.

“I do believe in Juanes’ good intentions. I just think his intentions are very naive,” Aguila said of the concert.

The concert that was supposed to bring the message of freedom and peace turned shockingly tense on both sides of the Florida Straits.

U2’s 360 Tour, their first tour since Vertigo in 2006, is named for the round set design that allows fans to encircle the stage. The tour supports U2’s latest album, “No Line on the Horizon,” which was released worldwide in March. The gig brought the band back to Massachusetts on Sunday to kick-off two nights of shows at Gillette Stadium.

Snow Patrol was the opening act for Sunday’s show. The opener’s highlight was an impromptu sing along. When vocalist Gary Lightbody called it “humiliating” when a previous crowd declined to sing with him, Gillette Stadium was instantly filled with the a capella voices of thousands. “Shut your eyes and sing to me,” the crowd sang—a line from the band’s “Eyes Open” album. As Irish flags waved in the upper tiers, the support for the Irish and Scottish band members was palpable. The band’s 30-minute set also included their radio hits “Chasing Cars” and “Hands Open.”

When thanking U2 on stage, Lightbody told the audience to get prepared. “It’s the best gig I’ve ever been to,” he said, “and I’ve been to it seventeen times. It’s gonna blow your freakin’ minds.”

The futuristic stage was mind-blowing on its own, towering over the field with a 360-degree screen and a smoking center structure that resembled a rocket. Bono called the set a cross between a “space station” and a “rock-and-roll laboratory” during Sunday’s show. “Great to be back home in Boston,” he said to the crowd of over 60,000 fans. “Are you ready for the ride?”

The set list covered most of U2’s hits, with an intensity that mounted like a countdown to blastoff. The 360-degree screen gave the illusion of spinning faster and faster as the band performed “Vertigo.” By “Elevation,” the crowd on the field was worked into a frenzy as band members crossed moving bridges on the set to get closer to the audience. Guitarist The Edge, bassist Adam Clayton, and percussionist Larry Mullen, Jr. all had solo moments on the bridges near the fans.

The show was made better by the sound quality, which was clear from the top levels to the field. The additional lighting helped transport the audience to another planet, coaxed there by a non-stop intensity from the band and the energized (and notably Irish) crowd.

The only indication that Gillette Stadium was still on the ground came in the last quarter of the show, which was dedicated to the band’s political activism. An Irish lullaby was dedicated to pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, who has been under house arrest since she won the Burmese election in 1990. Bono asked the crowd to hold up her picture or put on masks of her face, which were handed out before the show. “Let her face be your face,” Bono told the crowd. “Tonight we walk on for her.”

As part of the political message, certain sections of the floor were designated for those with (RED) Zone tickets, which were auctioned off to the highest bidders. Part of the proceeds will benefit Product (RED), an initiative that raises money to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. The crowd grew solemn after this section of the set, leaving the call for an encore quiet and anticlimactic.

Despite the added weight of the message, most the audience stayed throughout the encore. Cell phones were lifted throughout the stadium and the lights were dimmed, creating the illusion of being in space, surrounded by thousands of illuminated stars. Bono finished the show by thanking the audience. “Thank you for giving us a great life,” he said.

The show offered up a sample of what the future might offer us, both musically and politically, and the crowd was mesmerized for the whole ride. If the future needs a big kiss, it tastes pretty damn good.

Photography and video by Allison Hughes for Blast

They came up with “The Jaguar Club” after drummer Jeremiah Joyce came across the intricate logos of organizations of car devotees one day while doing a Google Image search.

“It’s never been a strong point,” according to Joyce. “We were terrible at coming up with band names.”

Blast chatted with The Jaguar Club at their record release party at Brooklyn’s Union Hall last month. Since forming in 2006, the band has released two EPs. Their first full-length album, “And We Wake Up Slowly,” was released September 1.

Joyce and bassist Yoichiro Fujita met while both were students at Vassar College and eventually moved to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn together.

“In the fall of 2005, we were really getting the itch to start a band,” Joyce said.

Meanwhile, singer Will Popadic, a former Emerson College student who had recently relocated to New York from Los Angeles, posted an ad on Craigslist saying he was looking to meet like-minded musicians.

“It was just so nice and warm and friendly,” Joyce recalled thinking upon coming across Popadic’s ad. “He was like, ‘I just moved to New York…‘”

And the rest, as they say, is history. The newly-formed group began writing songs in the spring of 2006, released an EP that fall, and toured extensively up and down the East Coast in 2007.

“Basically, we hit the ground running,” Joyce said.

“And We Wake Up Slowly” was recorded earlier this year in an 300-year-old barn in New Paltz, in upstate New York — a stark contrast to the Brooklyn basements in which most of the songs were written. The band members say the experience was a bit like camping, with musical instruments scattered around the converted studio, which had no running water.

“It definitely took us out of our element,” Popadic said. “A lot of the sound and texture is a product of being there.”

“You just feel so liberated from everything back in the city,” Joyce said. “It feels like home, for me.”

In fact, much of the record deals with typical quarter-life crisis themes, one of which is “being a country mouse in the city,” as Popadic puts it.

“I don‘t love cities, but I have to be in them to do this,” said Popadic, who is from rural Massachusetts.

The members cite Oasis, Band of Horses, The National, Idlewild, and Radiohead among their influences. Their sound, at times, resembles what The Smiths might have sounded like if they’d been an arena rock band. Popadic’s vocals bear more than a passing resemblance to David Byrne’s, with occasional theatrical warblings like those of Rush’s Geddy Lee.

Still, feeling that their sound was a bit lacking, the trio recently added a second guitarist for live shows, Gavin Dunaway, who had been living in D.C. and had seen the band perform several times.

“We were always looking for ways to make (our sound) bigger,” Joyce said. “He’s like a new pair of socks. They’re so instantly comfortable, and yet they’re new.”

Dunaway’s proposal for a new band name? “Gavin and the Jerks.”

But for now, perhaps out of necessity, it seems “The Jaguar Club” will stick.

“We had a small window of opportunity (to change the name),” Fujita said, as his bandmates considered their newly-minted LP. “And now it’s too late.”

Be on the lookout for her new film and her swimwear line on the catwalk.

Blast: First we’d like to talk about your new film, “Sorority Row.” Have you worked with the horror genre before?

Caroline D’Amore: No, I did a really low budget indie horror film where I played a ghost but I’ve always been a really big horror film fanatic. This is my first big horror film so I’m really excited about it.

Blast: I recently saw on another interview that you mentioned that “Sorority Row” has elements from films such as “Mean Girls” and “Scream,” can you explain that a bit more?

CD: Yeah, honestly it’s the dry sense of humor that all these young girls have.

I feel like this people will have low expectations for this movie, but the witty dry sense of humor is so right on and funny throughout the whole thing. Without the horror, it’s a comedy, without the comedy it’s a horror film. So it’s one of the better horror films. Dry and hysterical but really scary at the same time.

Blast: Do you think you’ll do more horror movies in the future, or what genre would you like to explore more?

CD: Absolutely. Maybe not the same type but I’d love to do more-whether working, writing or..I’d just like to be involved. I love horror movies-they’re never going to win an Oscar but it’s a fun time shooting, so I’m game! And everybody loves horror films, there’s a big market for them.

Blast: I’m also interested in your DJ career-how did you get into music?

CD: Honestly, I’ve always been obsessed with DJing and DJ AM kind of showed me everything. I was always watching him and thinking he was the coolest guy in the world-I still do. And I’d annoy him — ‘whats that? what are you doing there?’ And I took a job. A guy asked for a female DJ, and I told him I was, but then I thought, ‘Oh no! What did I do?’ So I asked DJ AM, and he helped.

After that I got asked to do another show, and it kind of blew up from there. I’ve been all over the world — Egypt, I did the Olympics, and then I did the MTV awards in Japan. I DJ’ed with Will.i.am and somebody in Japan came up to me that night and asked to sign me!

(Check out the track “Love Like This One,” and her new album “J-Girls’ Celebrity Mix” on Sony)

It’s been the most amazing trippy experience ever, I never thought that is where my career would go. If I had to have a career anywhere else, Japan would be the place. It’s been a wild ride and it’s so fun, and I’m actually getting offers from really great artists to remix their stuff.

Blast: So knowing about music and rhythm must be helpful when doing fashion shows, right? How does those two aspects of your life connect?

CD: Everything is slowly connecting, it’s the weirdest thing! It’s all kind of coming together. I think my future, end goal in life would probably be just to have my own production company, make my own movies and put music to it that I like. Something where I can combine all of my talents. I’m on a good path right now.

Blast: And you have a fashion line?

CD: A swimwear line called D’Amore by Marceau and we’ve done Smashbox and Miami Fashion Week, all that.

It’s on the Dash website and featured on Kourtney & Khloe Take Miami. We used their Dash models, and it was pretty cool. Seven hundred people got turned away at the door; it was packed!

Blast: Is there a specific trend in fashion right now that you really love? Or is there a trend you don’t like for that matter?

CD: Yeah, I kind of don’t always go with the trend. I really (don’t like) the little headbands that are in right now. I kind of like cool vintage rocker shirts, I love the look of looking like you raided your boyfriends closet. It’s always cute.

Blast: Anything else you’d like to add?

CD: I just want everybody to see Sorority Row and enjoy!

Present during the first exploratory meetings between Harmonix and the Apple Corps. shareholders, as well the game’s final days in production, Randall possesses a unique perspective on the monumental effort put forth by the 300+ employees at the music/gaming company to render the Beatles properly in the video game medium. We sat down with Josh to discuss the need for secrecy, meeting with Macca, and the end of the affair.

Josh Randall: I’ve been working on the game since we first started talking about the idea of doing Beatles Rock Band. I was on the front lines between Harmonix and Apple Corps and the shareholders — the shareholders are Paul and Ringo, and Yoko, and Olivia Harrison. So, we had most of the company working on it — we’re about 300 people now, so most of us were focused on that.

Blast editor John Guilfoil: What was the first game you worked on here?

JR: Frequency. Before Harmonix, I was with Looking Glass Studios. We did Thief and System Shock.

Blast’s Ben Lindbergh: Now that you’re so close to release, are you looking back and reflecting on all the things that had to come to come together for this to become a reality? Does it seem like something you couldn’t have imagined happening a few years ago, with all the people and companies involved?

JR: There’s definitely been some reflection. Yeah, it’s been amazing. I still kind of — I have to say, I’m still waiting to see it on the shelves before I can actually relax. Because it was so secret for a really long time, that it was really tricky to sort of, every day — like, every email that I sent, I’d have to recheck all the people that that I was sending to, just to make sure. You know, like, ‘Am I going to blow it today? Oh, I didn’t blow it today! All right, great, it’s good till tomorrow!’ But yeah, it’s been a pretty amazing journey for everyone involved.

BL: How receptive were the shareholders initially? I know it was an idea that came, at least in part, from George’s son. Was it something that they had to be convinced to do? Something that appealed to them immediately?

Beatles Rock Band has been Randall's biggest challenge in more than 10 years with Harmonix (Darcy Hofmann for Blast)

JR: It’s funny, Alex, our CEO, I remember talking with him years ago, and he was like, ‘Yeah, someday we’re going to do a Beatles game!’ I was like, ‘Ha ha ha, that’s hilarious.’ And then, I guess Dhani (Harrison) had been a fan of our earlier games, and somehow met the head of MTV, Van Toffler. And Van was like, ‘Oh, well we just acquired Harmonix, you should talk to Harmonix.’ So Dhani met with Alex, and they sort of kicked around a Beatles Game.

My interaction with all the shareholders was amazing. It was like they understood, just looking at what we showed them — you know, our first meetings were just showing them Rock Band and talking about our experience with Rock Band, and how we find that it’s encouraging people to play music, or to have a deeper understanding of the music they already love.

So I think they got that, and then once we started talking about some of the creative things we could do, I think they started getting excited, when they realized, ‘Oh, this is going to be like a new edition to the Beatles catalog, this is the real deal.’ So, with that in mind, they all really pushed us to do new stuff.

BL: You put a demo together for them initially, right? Did they play it, or did they just watch it?

JR: They watched us play it. It was basically, I think it was a few (Beatles) songs that you could play in Rock Band, and then there was a video, where we had spent a few months basically sculpting all the heads of the Beatles in 3-D, and sort of stuck them into the game, but didn’t have them animating, they were all just sort of posed. But our game engine used camera cuts and stuff to make it look almost like the Budokan concert, and we showed them that. They could use their imaginations to figure out where that was going to go.

JG: Obviously this game was a challenge, and every project you take on was difficult, but what was it like having Paul McCartney kind of correct you, and say, ‘No, that is not how I stand, this is how I stand!’ Did that, overall, make it a lot more difficult for you? What was that like?

JR: I think the biggest challenge for us on this project was really just the fact that most video games don’t look good until, really, the last month of production. And so, we were in a situation where we really wanted to show progress, and show that, like, ‘You guys are going to look amazing in the game, and the whole game is going to be fantastic and look gorgeous.

But, it was more like, ‘Right now all we can show you is that we’ve got guys on stage, and they’re kind of goofy because we might not have perfected all the technology’ or whatever. And so what we wound up doing was basically having a lot of visual milestones, where we would have to, pretty early on in production, push to have a demo that would maybe show like 3 or 4 songs, but they would be sort of like proof of concepts. Like, ‘Here’s what the guys look like in these outfits, here’s what they look like when they move, here are some of the venues,’ and stuff like that.

And every time we would get to one of those milestones, me and some of the team would get on a plane over to Abbey Road, or go to New York, or wherever we had to go, to basically sit with the Apple Corps shareholders, get their feedback, and discuss it. And then we’d get their feedback and be like, ‘Okay, we’ll see you guys in a few weeks,’ and then we’d iterate it and come back. So, trying to sort of push the visual quality earlier in the pipeline is really tricky. Sometimes you just need that time to get all the little nuances right. So, we would have certain meetings where we’d go, ‘Hey, it’s Shea Stadium, and it’s huge, and it’s awesome, and there’s a crowd, and there’s all this stuff,’ and Apple’s like, ‘Yeah, but they’re not singing into their microphones.’ And we were like, ‘Oh, yeah yeah yeah. Next milestone, next milestone!’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, but—,’ and we’re like, ‘No, it’ll be good!’

Before Harmonix, Randall was with Looking Glass Studios working on Thief and System Shock. (Darcy Hofmann for Blast)

And after a while, those guys started to trust us. When I said, ‘All right, trust me, next month you’ll see all this stuff,’ and then we would deliver, and then they’d be like, ‘Okay.’

JG: Was there a specific nuance that really stuck out that one of the shareholders made happen, and said, ‘No, this is how you’re going to do this, this is how this is going to look?’ Was there one particular thing that one of the shareholders kind of walked you through?

JR: No, I think it was more like helping us find our way through stuff. I think that just meeting with any of them, they could sort of help, like,’ Oh, actually, if you really want to capture the spirit of this particular Beatle, you should do this and this and this.’ Or sometimes they didn’t know the technical terms to be able to guide us to where we should go, but they would be able to say, ‘Oh, well…’ Like, our John model wasn’t that good for a while, because he was slightly stooped over a little bit, and talking like Yoko, she was like, ‘No, he was way more powerful-looking than that, he should look better than that.’ And we were like, ‘Okay, what is it, what does she mean by that?’ And we went back and looked at all the footage, and you watch John when he plays, and he’s just like (mimics John Lennon). Just totally owning 50,000 people. And it was like, ‘Oh, okay, I get it.’

So we basically just took his skeleton and bent him back, and made him always sort of look down his nose, and it was like, ‘Hey, it’s John.’ It was just stuff like that that they sort of pushed to capture that spirit. Paul sat with Chris Foster, and I think we had written a few things, and he was just like, ‘No, actually that’s not how it happened.’ I think Paul realized, ‘Oh, now I can finally clear the air on a lot of this stuff, or I can put down how I remember it.’

It’s weird, because that’s one guy out of four, and he remembers it that way. So we had to sort of talk to him, then basically I think what Chris did was have all of his facts straight from a bunch of different books, and when he walked in or when he talked with Paul, he could be like, ‘All right, well this guy reports that it was this way, and this guy reports that it was this way.’ And Paul would be like, ‘Oh, well maybe it was this way.’ It was a long time ago.

JG: You mentioned kind of being part of the Beatles catalog with this game. With all the previous music games, both of the major competitors, there are dozens of dozens of bands poured into the game, there are hundreds of songs now, and it’s a game. How do you feel about how now you have all the Beatles albums — and Beatles Rock Band? It’s got all the intimate details, and their outtakes and stuff. How do you feel about this game not being just a collection of songs, but actually part of Beatlemania?

JR: It’s amazing. For us to be a part of that is really like a dream come true. And I think that when we were showing it to the shareholders, they sort of realized, ‘Oh, this is the new Anthology.’ That’s what they were saying. And ‘This is the way that kids are going to be introduced to us now.’ And so, they were like, ‘Make sure this is right!’ And we were like, ‘Okay!’ So I think what we tried to do is really sort of make the game feel like it came through them. We wanted it to feel like the Beatles in-game. It hasn’t totally hit me yet, but I’m sure in a few years, I’ll look back at this time and think, ‘Whoa, that was really cool.’

JG: What do you think is the most epic part of the game? The one that’s really going to capture new fans, and make our moms scream and cry when they see it?

One of the challenges Harmonix faced was showing the Beatles shareholders their progress over months and months of building the game. They created milestones to show specific aspects of development.

JR: Oh, yeah. Well, I think there are a few dreamscapes in there that have really had an emotional impact on people. I think it depends on what your relationship is to the Beatles. For my mom, she was more into the early pop stuff, and so when she’s seen the stuff in the Sullivan show, she actually remembers watching that on TV, or seeing the Shea Stadium concert. She gets caught up in the sort of Beatlemania, fan aspect of it. But I’ve seen other people really respond to dreamscapes. ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ that one in particular is really moving. And I think that for me, the most moving one is either ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ which still makes me smile every time I play it — I’ll get like halfway through the song, and think ‘This is cool,’ and then something will happen on-screen, like the guys will look at me or the sun will come up or something, and I’m like, ‘Oh, this is awesome.’ The one that’s probably most epic is ‘Sgt. Pepper,’ just because that was our biggest one. That one took a long time, and you’re sort of going from one place to another, and all this stuff. Another one that, for me, is pretty moving, is the ‘Within You Without You/Tomorrow Never Knows,’ that’s another that’s really trippy and has some good shots of George looking at you, and the drums are really awesome.

BL: Does the fact that you’re dealing with such an iconic band, and the fact that most people will be coming into it knowing not only the music, but the visuals, the way these guys acted, and some of the history, did that make your job easier, knowing that there would be some currency among the players, or did it make it more difficult because you had to conform to those expectations?

JR: I think it was basically like, ‘Oh, great, everyone’s going to know these songs already. That’s awesome.’ And I think that happened with the whole vocal harmony feature, where it’s like, people already know how to sing the main part, so if they want to reach and try to sing the harmony parts, they at least have that foundation there. So, there was that. But more than that, it was the challenge of like, ‘Okay, we now have to make four of the most recognizable people in the world, and make their 3-D avatars look good.’ And that’s incredibly daunting. And then with the dreamscapes, that was another one where people have had this music in their heads for their whole lives, and every time they hear this music, they get a certain image in their head of what this song looks like. And so, we were pressed with coming up with these, basically interactive music videos, that somehow meet or exceed the visuals that they have in their heads. Which was like, ‘I hope we don’t screw this up,’ you know?

BL: Was there every any consideration of going with a hyper-realistic look, or was it always sort of a toned-down, Rock Band, cartoony version?

JR: I think that we very early on realized that the closer you get to hyper-real, the closer you get to the Uncanny Valley, where it’s like the closer it gets to human, but is not, your brain is like, ‘Hey, that’s not a human!’ and instantly picks it out. So, we were all really concerned about that. We didn’t want these guys to be creepy. We wanted them to be cute and lovable and have all the charisma that the real guys do. If you watch these guys play live, there’s just so much joy that pours out of these guys, and they’re so clever. They always seemed like they had some sort of inside joke while they were playing, little smirks and things like that. So we really tried to go in and identify that stuff, and sort of put that into our characters. But I think if we had gone for a more realistic thing, it just would’ve come off creepy. You just can’t do it yet. Maybe at some point your brain will not care, but right now, it’s like—especially if there are still movies that are kind of creepy in that way when they try to make 3-D humans, trying to do it on a game console is really hard.

BL: Was there any consideration ever given to trying to cram a second guitar note chart onto the screen, or did you always know that you were going to try to compress them into one?

JR: Yeah, I think that early on, we sort of realized that doing our standard Rock Band thing of taking all the guitars and putting it on one track was going to be more fun, because then you’d have, you know, when you design a Rock Band “level,” when you’re looking at a song, you want to make sure that each player has enough note content to last the entire song. So, if there are these big, long pauses while you’re waiting for someone else to play something, then it gets kind of boring. So I think if we had two guitar tracks, then that’s probably what would happen. Each person would have a track that was kind of spotty. So I think we all just kind of quickly were like, ‘Yeah, just put it all on one track to make it fun to play all the way through.’

BL: Did you ever worry that maybe the Beatles, despite their popularity, weren’t the band best-suited for a game like this, because of their experimentation, the unusual instruments, the fact that they don’t really fit into the “rock god” paradigm?

JR: Well, they don’t shred, right? That was one thing that was just like, ‘Oh, well, there aren’t a million insane guitar solos,’ so just from a difficulty standpoint, in the beginning I was like ‘Well, how is this going to work?’ And then once we added vocal harmonies and were basically having people play an instrument and sing in harmony like the Beatles did, it’s really challenging. So I think for people who want a challenge out of this game, it’s like, ‘Hey, the Beatles could do it — can you do it?’ That sort of thing.

JG: What’s your favorite song on the list so far?

JR: It kind of changes, you know? I think I’m still psyched about “Sgt. Pepper,” because that’s my favorite Beatles song, going back to when I was a kid, and favorite album. But it depends on my mood. We definitely play the game around here a lot. When we were making the game, we’d play the game just to sort of blow off steam, which was great. I’d sort of go between, if I needed to chill out, I’d play ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ if I needed to blow off steam, I’d play ‘Helter Skelter’ or some of the early tracks that are pretty fast and fun, and we’d sort of clear our minds to go back and finish working. But I think probably ‘Sgt. Pepper.’

JG: On the question of the two major music games out there: Guitar Hero was a phenomenon that Harmonix brought into the world, really introduced everyone to. And for the last couple of years, Guitar Hero has still been — when people think of music games, the first thing they think of is Guitar Hero. With Rock Band, you really turned a corner, and really got people thinking about the multiplayer aspect of this. Do you think Beatles Rock Band finally kind of comes full circle for Harmonix, that now you’ve kind of taken back the throne of the music gaming world?

JR: I don’t know. I guess for me, I’m still surprised that there are other people making music games besides us. When I started, there was Harmonix, and then these Japanese companies, whose games didn’t really come over to the States. So, now I think that it’s a really interesting time, that there are all these people making music games. And I think for people that love music, it’s a fantastic time. As far as the throne, or the king or whatever, I don’t really have a comment on that. I’m just really amazingly psyched that the Beatles chose to work with us, and I’m so proud of my team for what they were able to accomplish. And I really hope people will love it when it comes out. I think it’s an amazing game, and I think pairing the music and story of the Beatles with our gameplay is — well, it’s really fun.

BL: Could you see yourself doing another band-centric game in the future, or would it just be all downhill from here?

JR: Oh, it’s all downhill. (jokes) I don’t know. I’m taking a vacation. (laughs) It would be cool to work with other bands if they were cool and creative and wanted to engage with us on a creative level. I’m kind of up for anything.

JG: Is there a band that’s not been in a Rock Band game that you’d really like to work with?

JR: I don’t know. I’m actually a big techno guy, so there are a bunch of bands or types of music that I’d like to see in our games again, but I already got to make a bunch of those games ten years ago, so I’m not complaining.

BL: How much more effort goes into prepping one track for this game, as compared to one track for Rock Band, where you’re not necessarily having to tailor the video to a specific band, and maybe you’re not having to deal with audio that’s from 45-year-old two-track sources? How much more effort goes into a single track of this game than would go into downloadable content for Rock Band 2?

JR: Right. Well, Rock Band is made in a pretty modular way, that allows you to—talking about offering stuff. Our venues are set up in a way that basically for any song, it’ll sort of look good in any venue. For the Beatles Rock Band, since we have this concept of dreamscapes, we wound up making a bunch of graphical assets that are really specific to that one song, which is just a mammoth undertaking. Also, we had never done that stuff before. You know, we’d never had guys walking through a field or anything like that. So, from that standpoint, that’s a huge production difference, custom-crafting all the graphics for each individual song.

BL: Does that limit the scope of what you’re looking to do with the DLC at all?

JR: Actually, no. What we did, which was tricky, was we made, for songs that are going to wind up in dreamscapes in DLC, there’s actually stuff that’s on the disk that you haven’t seen yet. So when new DLC songs come out, that’ll help conserve new custom assets for that. And then some stuff is going to be, almost doing a mash-up of the stuff that you’ve seen before. So you might revisit certain dreamscapes that have been tweaked out or changed in different ways. We tried to come up with a modular system that would work for these dreamscape elements as well. If there were time, it would be cool to like, for every single song, go really deep and make it totally custom for every DLC song. But I think the level of customization that you’ll see is actually really good.

BL: Are you looking at making the whole catalogue available eventually, or is that a little ambitious?

JR: Yeah, it’s a little ambitious. I think right now we’ve got three albums that we’ve announced, plus the “All You Need is Love” single. It would be cool to keep going.

John M. Guilfoil and Marc Normandin of the Blast staff and Blast correspondents Steve Bagley and Darcy Hofmann contributed to this report.

Dunn’s reporting revealed a pattern of at best unscrupulous and at worst blatantly racist behavior by Emerson over several decades of tenure review.

House and another professor named Pierre Desir, who are both black, were denied tenure last year. They were the only professors denied tenure, and they were the only professors who were black.

House filed a complaint with the state Commission Against Discrimination last year.

According to Dunn’s latest reporting, Emerson agreed to take both professors back without tenure. House agreed, and he will be re-reviewed in 2011 for promotion. Desir appears to have declined, and he will not be returning this fall.

Dunn has reported that in Emerson Colllege’s 129-year history, it has never promoted a tenured black male faculty member, even though tenure is usually accompanied by a promotion from assistant to associate professor.

Dunn wrote a series of articles last spring attracting national attention and leading the school to convene an independent review of its tenure process.

The Beacon could not reach house Wednesday night for comment.

Blast editor John Guilfoil: Well, we’ve talked to the audio guys already, and the project lead on the game. You had to kind of take the audio and the concept and all the orders from the shareholders and crew and make it look good. What was part of the challenge of doing that?

Dare Matheson: What wasn’t part of the challenge of doing that? Obviously, it’s like you’re taking some of the most iconic popular music, and everybody who likes the Beatles, and who’s listened to the Beatles, has their own sort of connection with it. People listen to the lyrics, and have their own interpretations and visualizations that go along with it.

It’s sort of like, with the historical venues, that’s sort of one thing, and that’s really tied up in our interpretation of the characters and the settings. Maybe I’ll just speak to that really quickly and then go to the dreamscapes, because I think that’s really where things get crazy, and that’s really where the biggest challenge for us in the game was. So, with the characters, we really wanted to get something that felt—you know, there’s a whole range of ways that the band has been depicted in terms of art. Everybody’s familiar with their likenesses and their personalities, and the emotions that they show on their face, so we really wanted to get the emotional side across. They’ve been depicted in, for example, the Yellow Submarine movie, which is a great reductive approach to them that could represent the furthest extreme of what we could’ve done. And we like that style, we like that look. But it felt like that would be too limited for the majority of the experience, for a total experience of the band in this medium. So we kind of looked at that possibility.

What we wanted to do was get something that immediately was familiar as the Beatles, had all of their unique identity and personality that could show through for the four guys, that people could pick up on and really connect with, and have it be a bit stylized. Because on the one extreme would be going too cartoony, and you wouldn’t get enough of the identity and richness of connection — you’ve seen photos and footage and all that, so it could be sort of like you go too far in that direction. The other danger would be to go sort of too realistic, and you know how it is in games where it’s like, you see something where somebody’s trying to make a real person, and it just looks creepy, and it just looks kind of scary and kind of gross, so we wanted to avoid that.

The dreamscapes Matheson helped create add to the Beatles experience in the game.

So that was the key, and that’s the thing that stands true whether you’re talking about the historical venues or the dreamscapes. With the historical venues, we really just looked at a lot of the archival footage, and we really tried to get a sense of the atmosphere, and that’s the thing that we went for, we went for the atmosphere and tried to find, for each one of the five historical venues, that each one of them had a distinctive atmosphere from each other, and it so happened that we did. In some cases, we exaggerated a little bit.

For example, Budokan was — you know, typically in these games we go from a smaller venue setting to a bigger one, showing a sort of career arc there. And in this case, Budokan was a smaller place than Shea Stadium, and Budokan happened afterwards. So in the case of Budokan, we didn’t want it to feel like a letdown, so we exaggerated the verticality of Budokan, and really had it feel like this sort of compressed version of a giant arena. And the stage in Budokan is — I think the real stage was something like 12 or 15 feet, really tall, just this giant blue plan box — so we even exaggerated that a little bit further, and just made everything feel like it was going ‘up.’

From the beginning, with the psychedelic dreamscapes, when we showed an early prototype of a dreamscape — it wasn’t even a prototype, it was just a storyboard, an animatic — to Giles Martin, it was this idea that the band would depart from Abbey Road, and they would change into more psychedelic outfits, and they’d be in a magical land. And Giles was like, ‘Okay, that’s cool. Looks good. I just want to make sure that you guys don’t hold back.’ And he’s like, ‘Make sure this is as psychedelic as you can make it.’ Because, going to a magical land — I think the land in our animatic looked a little bit like the Yellow Submarine movie, and he basically said, ‘Okay, that was psychedelic in the sixties, but what’s psychedelic now? You guys have to bridge the gap, because something that is truly psychedelic is something that is a new experience.’

You're taking some of the most iconic popular music, and everybody who likes the Beatles, and who’s listened to the Beatles, has their own sort of connection with it, Matheson said. (Darcy Hoffman for Blast)

So, that was our big call for ourselves, that in the dreamscapes, and in the style of the game generally, we wanted to find something that — you know, the Beatles’ music, the most amazing music, happened forty years ago. So, we’re trying to find something that will feel authentic and connect clearly and well with that time, for people now, so that people who were there then and saw the Beatles will immediately connect with it, and yet people who have never heard of the Beatles, who see this game and will be able to experience them for the first time, it will feel connective for them, as well.

Blast’s Ben Lindbergh: How much of a help or hindrance was it that the Beatles have this legacy of visual creativity themselves? We didn’t get to see your dreamscape for “I Am the Walrus,” but I’ve read that it sort of mimics the Magical Mystery Tour ethos that they created. Is that something that made you feel constrained by what they had done in that area already, or did that free you to be even more creative?

DM: No, it was awesome. First of all, they set the bar high, and so there’s a ton of rich material there. There’s all the album art, there’s their movies, their crazy clothes, their avant garde look, the music itself. It’s like they shot for the skies, so there’s a ton of rich material to draw from, for one thing. For the second thing, they — Apple Corps, and the shareholders themselves and everybody we worked with — were very encouraging of us to not hold back. So, basically, as opposed to what you might think could happen with sort of a ‘brand’ that is from that far away of an era, there’s a chance that it could have become rigid, and only presented to the world in a certain way that’s comfortable for them. But no, they totally wanted—once we gained their trust, once they saw that we had people that could interpret the Beatles, and they were comfortable with that—they really encouraged us to go nuts. You know, they told us what they thought, we had weekly calls with them, and we worked through everything together, but they were very encouraging of that. So, again, on another level, it was not constraining. And I thought there was a third thing, but, there’s only two.

JG: Building the characters themselves, the four guys on the stages, were there specific things that the shareholders would insist on, or were there things that you really wanted to make sure you captured, like the way someone stood, or the way someone strummed the guitar, or the way Ringo banged the drums? Were there certain things about the Beatles, when building the characters, that you were encouraged not to miss?

DM: Well, first of all, we absolutely set that challenge for ourselves. We knew that we wanted to make the characters look, visually, a little bit reductive — you know, they don’t have skin pores, and we sort of buffed out certain areas of detail to try to find the distilled version of Paul McCartney’s face. But we really wanted the animation to feel very much like them. So we really tried to nail the movements and the little nuances. We tried to pick up everything little nuance. Generally, peoples’ faces are much more expressive than you find in videogames, and much more nuanced. And we tried to get that. Somebody told me recently — maybe it was a cover band or something — got a hold of one of the demos and was like, ‘Oh, this will be the acid test for this game — did they pick up on Paul’s crazy, weird, extra eyebrow motion on one side? They got it, they got it!’ We concentrated on Paul’s eyebrow for like a week straight.

One of Matheson's challenges was capturing the essense of The Beatles without crafting creepy, hyper-realistic computer people.

But in answer to your question, we had our own bar set very high. And we actually got feedback directly from the shareholders. Most intensely, actually, from Olivia and Yoko. I think Paul and Ringo gave us feedback, but they were kind of like, ‘Yeah, I look awesome in that!’ I think Yoko and Olivia have a legacy to maintain that goes beyond their own selves, so we got a lot of direct feedback from both of them, and it was super-helpful, incredibly useful.

A few of us went out to meet with Olivia in Friar Park out in England, and we brought the George model that we had at that point. And she opened up her private photo albums and showed us a bunch of pictures of George. And we earmarked some, and she had her assistant scan it and send it to us. And Yoko visited here, visited the office, and we looked at the game together. And she gave us a lot of detailed feedback on, specifically, ‘Well, there’s something going on here, there’s a way that John is nodding his head that he just doesn’t do that, he wouldn’t do that.’

So somewhere along the way, we may have added in a little of our own thing, or a motion capture actor added in something extra, and that was something that Yoko didn’t find to be authentic, so we stripped that out. We had pages of notes. She was here for about four hours, and we had pages and pages of notes, and we just responded to that feedback. Super, super helpful.

JG: What was it like being that hands-on with the band and the shareholders? Usually you’re dealing with dozens of bands, and you’re never really putting that much detail into what specific members of bands look like, like in Rock Band or Rock Band 2. What was it like having this level of detail, focusing on this one particular band?

DM: For me, it was great. I love it. I mean, I love Rock Band, and it’s sort of a platform, and that’s its purpose. But because of that, you’re automatically, things get more sort of dispersed. So it’s great for me. This game has been my favorite version of this type of game to work on, because the music — there’s something already that roots it and makes it consistent, and that is that it’s based on a real band that had an artistic legacy. And it was such an artistic legacy that, like with your question, it basically, we had the world to go after with this one.

Blast got to play Beatles Rock Band at the Harmonix Studios in Cambridge (Darcy Hofmann for Blast)

BL: Do you feel that some of the customization options that were present in Rock Band or Rock Band 2, do you think that’s something that will be missed? As a fan, I don’t think it would be for me, but if there are players who take a lot of pleasure in dressing up their characters, or making them personalized, putting their stamp on them somehow, do you feel like that’s something that will be lacking here?

DM: Well, I think that the idea of a Beatles dress-up shop would be fun for some people, because obviously they had this very exciting, avant-garde fashion sense. But really, the choices that we made in terms of the design, and what we exposed to the player, we tried to keep everything to the core experience of the Beatles. And I think that that might be a fun novelty, but I don’t think that it would add to the game, and in fact, it kind of would subtract from it. And there are other places that we had to make concessions like that, but I think that with every choice we made, we tried to always go towards advancing this very core, Beatles-centric experience.

BL: Do you feel that in the in-studio portions of the game, does the fact that the band was, at least by modern standards, pretty restrained in terms of their movements and actions on stage — obviously with the dreamscapes, you can kind of get away with it, but with those actual segments in a live setting, was there less for you to focus, less going on on the screen, less action?

DM: Well, the Beatles had a ton of energy on stage. I mean, they weren’t kicking over props or spewing fire or anything, but they had a tremendous amount of live energy. But yeah, in the studio, the great thing about the studio is, so, right, they’re not performing for an audience, they’re not performing for the camera, they’re performing for the audio track. In the studio parts, every time they’re in the studio, and you see that in the game, the song ends up expanding out into a visual dreamscape. So it’s actually really cool, and this is something that we haven’t seen in these games before, where it’s a much more intimate feeling. So rather than having it be about, ‘I’m performing to a million people,’ or whatever, it’s more about, you really do feel like you’re sitting there watching John Lennon close his eyes and rock his head back and just sing into the microphone, and you get this much more emotional thing that just sort of bravado and antics. Which is fine, too, but this is something a little bit nice to have in a Beatles game.

BL: How much research did you do even before you put anything on paper?

DM: Well, I’ve been researching this band since I was six years old. As a team, we did a ton of research, and in addition to other planning meetings and design meetings, we had, a couple times a week, we would spend an hour or two together. We spent, probably, several hours a week, just as a whole team, watching the Anthology, watching the movies, watching whatever we could get our hands on that would expand our knowledge. We were sending around emails with links to anything we could find. It was crucial. On the team, it goes from people who have been mega-Beatles fans since they were born because of their parents’ record collections, to people who, it’s newer for them and they’re learning a lot about it. But it’s crucial for everybody to be experts, Beatles experts, so that’s what we went for.

BL: Have you gotten a chance to see in person any of Paul’s recent concerts, where he had the footage playing behind him? Because for me, certainly, that would be pretty awesome.

DM: Yeah, I did, actually. It was cool, yeah. It was great. I saw him at Fenway Park a couple weeks ago, and yeah, he had two songs where he played footage from the game. One song he had dreamscape footage, and another one, he used some of the Passion Pictures intro footage. Yeah, it was great. He talked about the game on stage, and it was really, really cool.

John M. Guilfoil and Marc Normandin of the Blast staff and Blast correspondents Steve Bagley and Darcy Hofmann contributed to this report.

Who says Saturday night is the best night to go out? If you’re a Bostonian of the fairer sex, listen up because your city just got a lot more enticing during the week. If you’re sick of every girls’ night out being the same ol’ cosmo and lounge combo endeavor after another, the following might interest you and make you oh so fabulously in the know.

1. Fashionably Late at The Liberty Hotel

Ok so I gotta say it, if you haven’t heard of The Liberty Hotel’s Fashionably Late happening every Thursday night, you might be living under a rock. Sorry, but seriously. This is THE place to be on Thursday nights in the city. If you like fashion, an extensive cocktail list and rubbing elbows with the city’s finest, this is the ladies night to look forward to each week. While models circle the upper levels of the hotel as they display the creations of Boston’s hottest designers, you’ll feel the magic between you and that fantastically dressed stranger you keep locking eyes with.

Whether it be that perfectly mixed dirty martini, the stylish new “so now”  asymmetrical dress you’re rocking, or the vibrations of the music pumping with the beat of the fashion show, you’ll feel so chic. Make sure you know your designers before you approach however, as it’s the fashion lovers of Boston that frequent this weekly event.

But don’t let intimidation keep you holed up at home. There is no need to be dismayed by all those waif like types – The Liberty Hotel has made it that much easier to be chic. With one more week of summer, and our prayers for a possible Indian Summer, we may still feel compelled to watch those cals. Order from Liberty’s “Sleek” Cocktail menu, where the drinks won’t cost us more than twenty minutes on the treadmill the next day.

Check out this week’s Fashionably Late on September 3 from 8 p.m. 2 a.m., with clothing designed by Samuel Vartan’s and beats by Michael Savant. For true VIP status, plan ahead of time for your table reservations by emailing fashion@libertyhotel.com.

2. Red Sky’s Ladies Night

Fancy an irresistible concoction with a serving of some rockin’ 80’s tunes? Well, you’re in luck my fellow female liquid lovers; all you need to do is purchase just one $10 drink at Red Sky on Ladies Night, happening every Tuesday night from 5-9pm, and you are game for a FREE three course meal. Yes, you read that right. If that didn’t entice you enough, there is also a DJ spinning your favorite 80’s tunes so we can tap into the nostalgia of remembering our beloved MJ in true style.

Anyone who’s ever heard the word recession (maybe once or twice recently?) is running in their three inch heels every Tuesday night to savor that beloved, and much needed, martini to get in on this deal. The menu changes slightly each week, but always includes a soup or salad to start, an entree and a dessert. As if that wasn’t impressive enough, Red Sky is really showing us ladies some respect by always including a vegetarian option. You’ll be hooked on this Tuesday night treat in no time.

3. Suneri Boutique

Snapple Fact: Did you know that Wednesday is actually the worst day of the week for most people, and not the usual suspect (and sworn enemy) we all lovingly know as Monday?

Suneri Boutique of Somerville feels your pain and has come to our rescue with the perfect excuse to kiss that hump day slump goodbye. Suneri carries all things lovely, trendy, and is always feeling generous on Wednesdays from 5-8pm, as they offer complimentary wine, hors d’oeuvres, and discounts on their fine clothing and accessories.

Suneri also boasts its own art gallery for your viewing pleasure while you shop. The store is adorned with various works of art by local and emerging artists and photographers such as Christopher Elsasser and Sarah Pollman.

So stick it to Wednesdays from now on by gathering your group of tight knit girls and revitalizing with some great deals, munchies and of course some vino – just enough to get you to Friday with a smile as opposed to your usual mid-week “Don’t even talk to me til it’s the weekend” frown.

4. The Colonnade Hotel’s Roofdeck Pool

Now this is my kind of ladies night out — the kind where you are so excited for some much needed chick time you’re ready to start at noon. To start the day out right, get to the Colonnade Hotel’s anyone-who’s-anyone-is-there roofdeck pool, open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Make sure to get there by this coming Labor Day weekend when our balmy summer days are tragically over. Be a lady and properly say goodbye to summertime basking in the rays with your teeniest bikini, your impossibly hot female crew, and a strong drink in hand.

It may be a somewhat hefty entrance fee at $30, but who says a splurge isn’t worth it when you’re looking down at Boston atop the only roofdeck pool in the city? With favorable mentions in USA Today, Boston Magazine and Playboy.com, this is one joint you can’t afford not to check out.

Who knows who you’ll meet — the possibilities (and yachts and Miami beach houses…) are endless. Just make sure the when you talk about your extravagant experience at the Colonnade later on that day you refer to it as RTP, its nickname uttered by all the beautiful people in the know. Oo La La.

5. The Greatest Bar’s Country Night with WKLB 102.5

Ladies Love Country Boys.

Trace Adkins tells it like it is. A girl just can’t resist a man with a cowboy hat on, a country twang, and oh that farmer’s tan! Ok, that may be going a little too far. But in all honesty, country music has blown up in America, and females are a huge fan base. Although the Northeast isn’t a place that immediately comes to mind when thinking of those sexy tractors we keep hearing about, you better believe Boston has its share of country  music lovers.

The Greatest Bar caught wind of this trend and has grabbed our attention with their Country Music Night every Sunday from 4pm until the party ends, which won’t be early with $3 apps and frozen margaritas going for $5. With Country 102.5’s DJ Bob playing those county tunes we love so much, it’ll be hard to pass up the opportunity of a mini Countryfest right here in Boston every week!

Instead of making your to-do lists for the week and heading to bed early like every other Sunday, hit up The Greatest Bar this Sunday with your girl crew for something different from your usual. Your weekly routine won’t be completely out of whack, you and your ladies can down some frozen margs, split some apps, snag a cowboy’s number, and still be home in time to watch “Entourage”.

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There you have it, Boston babes. Grab your girls for some fun, and don’t wait until the weekend to do it!

We talked to Eric about crossing Abbey Road, the fleeting nature of fame and the tyranny of two-track recordings.

Blast’s Ben Lindbergh: When you sat down to select the songs initially — I don’t know exactly who was involved in that — how much weight was assigned to the popularity of the song of the song or the success of the song, versus how much fun you thought it would be to play, or how easy it would be to represent with the notes?

Eric Brosius: We definitely considered both of those things, like we always do. Actually, that’s pretty much what we do in all of Rock Band, there’s always this balance between playability and how popular it is, and some songs are in there for different reasons. But yeah, we wanted to find—pretty much all the Beatles songs are famous, outside of just a few. They’re one of the rare bands where like 80 percent of the catalog is completely famous, and 20 percent is lesser known. So, it was pretty easy to find songs that we thought everyone would just love playing, but that were also giant hits.

But we definitely looked at that, for sure. We also looked out for — you know, we wanted to grab songs from their entire career. From the beginning, and have roughly an equal number of songs from the different periods, just to make sure we hit all of their major albums and all of the time periods, and stuff like that. So it was just balancing those things together. There were some tricky things in the early songs, because some early songs were maybe harder to get, just because of the limited number of tracks that they had. So, we were always balancing that, and then we were talking to Giles Martin, who did all the actual mixing for us, because he knew the track layouts for every single song they’ve ever done, and he would always go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s problematic because of this, but this one I think we could do instead, because there’s some an extra tape of other stuff on here that we can use to make the song work.’

BL: So he had some sort of software that would be able to pick out the instruments individually when there was only a two-track recording, and then separate them somehow?

Harmonix Music Systems audio lead Eric Brosius makes his living playing with the soundtrack to your life, and he’s never had more fun than with Beatles Rock Band. (Darcy Hofmann for Blast)

EB: Yeah. And sometimes with a two-track recording, it also depends on even what was on the tracks, because some things are easier to separate, and some things are not, just depending on how it was mixed. If it’s a two-track recording, and they had some things panned to one side, that’s easy to separate from stuff that’s in the middle or on the other side. If it was a two-track recording where the whole thing was a stereo wash right down the center, that makes it a lot harder. So he kind of knew, not just the number of tracks of each song, but kind of where things were, and whether we would have an easier time separating them. Because yes, you can separate stuff, but it’s not a perfect solution. Some songs are kind of easy to get nice, clean separation, and some songs are harder, so we used all of that knowledge together.

BL: So then he would do all the work in Abbey Road, with some assistants, and then someone would come over here with a briefcase chained to his arm?

Sometimes with a two-track recording, it also depends on even what was on the tracks, because some things are easier to separate, and some things are not

EB: Well, he knew all about the Beatles stuff and mixing, so he and his guy, Paul Hicks, were in charge of actually recreating the mixes. Because the first step is just to like bring up the tapes, transfer them to digital, and then recreate the mix. Because what’s on the raw tape doesn’t usually sound like the raw mix in music. So, they spent a lot of time doing that, just making sure it came out, and they can recreate all the effects if there weren’t effects. Because sometimes effects weren’t printed to tape, right, they were this old gear, so they spent a lot of time doing that. And then we would usually fly over there and spend like five days there when we were going to pick up a batch of songs, and where they would bring up the mixes they had, and we would do some further editing, deciding which parts are going to be our playable guitar part, and which parts are not.

And then while we were at the studio, we’d bounce out the actual stems we needed for the game, and then we’d encode them into the final version that the game ships with right there, which was encrypted and high-security and all that kind of stuff. So we did everything there, and then we just brought the finished game assets back with us, because they were pretty keen on leaving all the original assets at Abbey Road, because they’re somewhat protective, as they should be.

BL: Was the fact that the remasters were being developed simultaneously, was there any work that was able to be saved or shared there, or was it just two separate processes?

EB: It was pretty much two separate processes, because on things that we’re doing, we’re going back to the multi-tracks. I’m not sure what was done in the mastering process, but usually remasterings are just, you go back to the two-track mixes, and then you use modern mastering techniques. So it was kind of separate, what they were doing was totally separate. I mean, it’s nice that they’re going to release them at the same time, which kind of shows how enthusiastic Apple and the Beatles are, which is cool, but it was really two separate processes.

Blast editor John Guilfoil: Can you kind of run our readers through the process of taking a song and putting it into Rock Band?

EB: Sure. So, for old songs like this, a lot of them are stored on magnetic tape. So the first thing to do is to transfer them to a digital format like Pro Tools, which is the standard that everyone uses. So you digitize all the tracks, and then the next step would be to take those and remix the song so it sounds like the original. Once the song is sounding good, with all the effects and levels balanced, then we bounce out stems, according to our specific needs, the ones we need in the game. Because we have one guitar player in the game, so if there are several guitars playing, at every given moment through the song, we decide which one is going to be the part you’re going to play. And that ends up being a composite of, maybe a little of John’s guitar here, maybe a little of George’s here, and that kind of thing.

And we bounce out the stems that we actually need for the game, then we basically encrypt them, interleave them into a single file that our game reads. So we have that, and that’s the audio part of it, it’s fairly straightforward. And then we have a team of people here that kind of transcribe all the music, putting down all the gems that you see, laying down all the tracks and putting the lyrics in. And that’s basically kind of like transcription using MIDI files, basically.

BL: So for someone who grew up listening to the ’80s pressings of the CDs, or compressed .mp3 versions of the songs and hasn’t heard the remasters yet, would this be the cleanest and the best they’ve ever heard the Beatles, even though it’s meant for playing as well as listening, and so there are compromises that have to be made there?

Blast spent the day at Harmonix learning about the game and its development. (Darcy Hofmann for Blast)

EB: I think so. And the thing that’s going to — yes, because part of the thing with Rock Band is, we’ll sometimes make some changes to the mixes. Sometimes, if there was a guitar part that was pretty buried in the original mix, but we want that to be the playable one, sometimes we’ll boost it a little bit so you can hear it more, because you want to hear the notes that you’re actually playing. So we always try to walk this line between — we don’t want to change history or anything like that, but with Giles’ approval, we would sometimes alter things. You know, ‘Let’s bring that up a little bit, because that’s going to be the playable part.’ So there are some things like that.

And the other really cool thing about the game is that, because most of our game is kind of featured around live stuff, most of the songs, we don’t have fadeouts in them, usually. And many times they went back to the way they actually played it in the studio, that usually had a proper ending. Because they’ll usually do the fade-out later, right in the mix. So in our game, a lot of times you get to hear the proper endings, which is really cool. So it’s like a little bit of extra material in most songs. And probably the biggest one is in ‘Helter Skelter,’ we don’t do the big fade back in, so you get to hear the way they played it through, which is pretty cool, and I think Beatles fanatics will love that stuff.

BL: Did you sit down initially and say, ‘We know we’re going to have forty-five songs,’ and then get a list of the catalog and cross things out, or did you start with a blank page, and say, ‘We have to have this one, and we have to have that one?’

EB: Well, we knew that we were going to have roughly forty to fifty songs, but we didn’t know exactly until the whole deal was worked out. So basically, everyone wrote down sixty or seventy of their favorite songs, and it was a bunch of the higher-ups at Harmonix, and the people at Apple, and Giles, and everyone, and we all kind of got together and came up with about forty-five, and then once in a while Giles would say, ‘Oh, I know this one can’t work, because this was actually just recorded on one track,’ and we would just kind of work it out.

And then there would be a little bit of back-and-forth, of course, about, ‘Let’s make sure that we have a good balance of Paul and John songs, so that we don’t just by accident have too many John songs and too many Paul songs,’ and ‘Make sure that we include the important George songs,’ and all this balancing. Same thing we do when we select songs for Rock Band. You balance out a bunch of things—we want to have songs from different decades, different styles, different things, so the same kind of process went through. And then we presented what we thought was our song list to the shareholders, who were Yoko and Paul and Ringo and Olivia Harrison, and they would give us their two cents on it, and we would make some adjustments. The song list was fairly easy to do.

BL: So they weren’t dictating anything, like ‘This song has to be in there, this one’s off-limits.’

EB: No. And the good thing is that Giles has worked with them before. He did the “Love” show, which is the big Cirque du Soleil thing in Las Vegas, he’s already kind of gone through this process with them, and he knows them very well, and they trust him. So that was one of the best things. Because we could kind of make all of our musical decisions, and if we got them blessed by Giles, then we were pretty confident that he could get them blessed by the important people. So, it made things very smooth.

Three-part vocal harmony is part of what makes Beatles Rock Band different from all other music games

BL: Were there any specific challenges that you faced as a result of the Beatles’ experimentation in the studio, or using somewhat exotic instruments that might not conform to the four-instrument mold? I know you have songs like ‘Because’ or ‘She’s Leaving Home’ coming out soon—how do you face those challenges, or how do you conform to this set-up?

EB: Well, in some songs—in the Beatles game, one of the cool things is we’re doing the harmonies, so that’s a big thing, because there’s so much importance on that. On other things where they had, maybe not a prominent guitar, but they had different instruments, we would probably swap them around, which we do in Rock Band once in a while. Like in, I think in ‘Strawberry Fields,’ you might end up playing the string parts a little bit on the guitar. And in a song like ‘Because,’ which has no drums, right, that would be a song where the drummer just kind of sits out and relaxes for a while. We’re not going to add anything to it, because we don’t want to change the song.

BL: I know you wanted to span the whole career and represent each part accurately—was there any thought that maybe the early Beatles or the late Beatles would appeal or connect to the modern audience more? Your first three downloadable albums coming out are from the middle-to-late period—is there any consideration given to emphasizing that period?

EB: We didn’t really think about that too much. I think that we wanted to—different fans have their different favorites, of course. So we really just wanted to tell the whole story of their career, so we wanted to just do that. As far as the downloads go, we know that technically we have an easier time with the later albums, because they tend to be cleaner, on four-track, where it’s easier, and harder times on the earlier albums. So it would be difficult to do Please Please Me as a full album, because while we could probably do a lot of the songs, it might be difficult, there might be some there that we’re just like, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to get the separation.’

But that being said, if we choose to do more albums, I’m sure we’ll do some early ones too, because we want to do as much as we can. It just also happened that I think the first three albums that we picked are three of the pretty big, iconic ones—Abbey Road, Sgt. Pepper’s. And we were going back and forth between Rubber Soul and Revolver, because we wanted something from that period, but we were debating back and forth.

BL: Would most of the team working on the game have described themselves as Beatles fans coming into it, or just sort of passionate music fans who came to appreciate the Beatles more during the process?

EB: Well, everyone’s a passionate music fan. I don’t think we had everyone was a passionate Beatles fan — certainly a fan in some ways — but we have a few people who were just obsessive. And so we set those guys on all the research. They’re the ones who spent hours poring over things, and making sure that the right person was playing the right guitar part, and they would look up, ‘Okay, is John playing this lick, or is George playing this lick?’ And they would try to figure it out to make sure the animations looked right, because we can kind of control that. So we had at least a half a dozen Beatles fanatics, which was really good.

John M. Guilfoil and Marc Normandin of the Blast staff and Blast correspondents Steve Bagley and Darcy Hofmann contributed to this report.

That type of resilience has become routine for the members of Jet, who have seen their share of ups and downs in the past six years.

Blast spoke with the Cester siblings earlier this year (pre-fainting) about the making of “Shaka Rock,” which was released in the U.S. on August 25. Unlike other sibling bandmates, say, for instance, (the now-defunct?) Oasis, the Cesters try to keep whatever tumult exists in their relationship out of the spotlight. They come off as goofy and affable, an at times comic duo who both claim allergies to aluminum and Lady Gaga.

“Shaka Rock” is Jet’s first offering in three years. After they finished touring behind their previous record, 2006’s “Shine On,” the band members took a much-needed hiatus, to regroup individually and collectively from a roller coaster ride that had begun three years earlier.

Jet found near-instant success in the wake their debut album, 2003’s “Get Born,” which spawned the hit singles “Cold Hard Bitch” and “Are You Gonna Be My Girl,” the latter of which was used in an Apple commercial. The Cesters admit their sudden, explosive rise to fame left them feeling dazed.

“I have no memory of 2003,” said Chris, 27. “It really was just one big show and one big canopy and one big whiskey slug. It was pretty nuts.”

While both gushed about being able to share stages with the likes of the Rolling Stones, they said the monotony of touring can be less than inspiring.

“(Musicians) are the kind of people, generally speaking … that want to sort of be excited, and they generally are excitable individuals,” Chris said. “On tour, that usually results in, you drink yourself to sleep every night because you’re going out of your fucking mind. So, touring can really rip you apart.”

The band’s follow-up, “Shine On,” was marred by the death of Chris and Nic’s father, who inspired the title track. Chris describes the time surrounding “Shine On” as “a black hole.”

“Mentally, physically … just, we were fucked up,” he said.

After taking time off and with both tragedy and triumph behind them, the band set out to make “Shaka Rock” with a healthier outlook and nothing to lose.

“I think we definitely felt a lot of pressure the last time (after the success of ‘Get Born’), but this time we didn’t really feel as much pressure at all,” Nic said. “We always put a lot of pressure on ourselves, but this time there was a noticeable lack of. We were in a happier place in our lives, and we’d been through some serious shit and got through it. And, (we’re) stronger and more equipped. So, I think it was a really good, natural sort of energy that these songs were borne from.”

The band channeled the positive vibes into a large-scale comeback concert of sorts, with an appearance at the Sound Relief benefit this past March for victims of the Australian wildfires.Jet played two televised shows in one day, one in Melbourne and one in Sydney, debuting new material in front of tens of thousands of audience members and countless other TV viewers.

“What a way to walk back onto a stage,” said Chris, widening his eyes. “I think everything sort of feels sort of better, including being able to come back on stage for the right reason, having produced your own album, and doing something beneficial to everybody else and playing for such a huge crowd. It’s just like, I haven’t felt this sort of confidence and happiness about doing what we do since our first record.”

Their sense of ownership is not misplaced. The band decided to adopt a new approach on nearly every aspect of the production of “Shaka Rock.

“Sitting down to write a record can be a real fucking drag if you don’t explore different ways of going about it,” Chris said matter-of-factly. “You need to find ways to keep yourself interested.”

“We just thought it was time to do something a little different than what we’d done in the past,” added Nic. “We took every measure to set that up. … We got away from L.A., and we changed record companies and we changed management. We shook things up and we ended up with an album that really sounds like we have.”

First up was a change in scenery. “Shaka Rock” was written and recorded in Sydney and Melbourne, as well as U.S. locales including Miami, Brooklyn, and Austin, Texas.

With the four band members spread out across the globe (in Italy, Australia, Los Angeles and London), the tracks were written, produced and rehearsed in different locales out of necessity.

“It can be a pain in the ass sometimes, but one of the positives that comes with that is that, every time we meet it’s in an interesting part of the world,” Nic said. “And you really get the buzz off the energy that place has to offer for a while. It’s kind of fun, especially because we’re kind of gypsies by nature, and we’re kind of used to traveling a lot.”

The geographical new direction is reflected throughout the record — both overtly, as on the bluesy “Goodbye Hollywood,” and more subtly, on the summer-y disco track “Beat on Repeat,” which was recorded in Miami.

“I think Australians are generally like that,” Chris said. “Often we can’t agree on one spot, because we can’t go to London, (for instance), because then (guitarist Cam Muncey) just gets to go home every night and we have to stay in a fucking hotel room. So we tend to move around.”

Some of the new approaches that resulted in “Shaka Rock,” however, were not so calculated. An accident with a kitchen knife, for instance, forced the multi-instrumentalist Chris to begin composing songs on bass rather than guitar.

“When I returned (from a post-breakup vacation in Morocco) there was literally nothing in the house,” he recalled. “So, for the first time in my life I thought, well, yeah, I like to cook. So, I’ll go down and buy myself some German steel knives, like really good knives so I can cut anything. And then literally about half an hour – “

“They really can cut anything,” Nic interjected.

“Yeah, it can cut human flesh. I can attest to that,” Chris affirmed. “I actually chopped the top of my finger off. … So I had to learn how to play the bass, and that had a huge influence, a really dramatic influence, on the way I write songs. It’s more about rhythm.”

One thing Jet has stuck to is the tried and true swagger rock style a la AC/DC and the Rolling Stones that propelled the band’s popularity in the first place. Though the band members began expanding their musical horizons between records, listening to more electronically-tinged acts like Daft Punk, don’t look for any bells and whistles on “Shaka Rock” aside from the occasional pre-programmed hand clap.

“I don’t really abide by the electronic background track,” explained Chris. “I think it’s cheating, to be honest. So, while we’re inspired by a lot of those sort of newer things, we definitely kept it organic. It was just sort of more from an inspirational standpoint, rather than trying to capture the same sort of sonic ideas.”

Acting as co-producers on the album gave the band more control over which elements they wanted to incorporate and to what extent.

“I was a bit concerned about how that was gonna go down, because obviously we’d never done it before and basically there was five producers in the room at any one time,” Nic recalled. “That immediately resulted in a different sonic sound, and a bit more of an exploratory thing, because we’re just a bunch of guys in a room, having fun, trying shit out.”

But both say the process turned out to be a relatively smooth one, likely due to the fact that they’ve been friends with guitarist Cam Muncey and bassist Mark Wilson since they were all teenagers.

“We all write and we all have completely different outlooks on life, and they often don’t agree with each other,” Chris said. “(But) I think often with one guy or one girl who’s running the show, it can really sort of be monotonous. … I don’t want to hear two songs about one thing. If I want that, I’ll buy a Britney Spears record.”

Of course, some of the tension in the studio inevitably comes from an innate sibling rivalry between the Cesters. But both say that they consider all their bandmates brothers, even if they are the only two who are related by blood.

“Your brother really is the first person you want in a band, and the last person you want in a band,” Chris said. “It’s an interesting dichotomy.”

“Obviously, it’s a big factor,” according to Nic. “It is really difficult sometimes, and sometimes it’s really fun. … The good thing is there’s always one guy in the band that we all agree is an asshole for a while, and it just keeps switching around. We all get a turn.”

Kidding aside, though, one gets the sense that it’s this family dynamic that has allowed Jet to persevere where other groups have faltered, to adapt and grow rather than giving up.

“To be honest, there’s really nothing that we haven’t had to face as a band together,” Chris said. “We’ve had massive success and we’ve had disappointment. You see what it’s like to be loved and to be hated, and you just get to a point in your career and your life … where you just go, fuck ‘em all. Just make your music, basically.”

“The music always brings you back,” he went on. “It’s like a good friend that you always have no matter what happens in your life. That’s what’s so precious about rock ‘n’ roll in particular, I think. There’s a lot of great genres and there’s a lot of things that I enjoy, but nothing really has that personal, close feeling that rock ‘n’ roll has. It really is just like your best friend, because it never lets you down.”

“Irene sits center stage,” according to vocalist/keyboardist/guitarist Ben Davis. “We definitely do not hide her.”

He refers, by the way, to a 1973 reel-to-reel tape machine that provides backing tracks during Bad Veins’ live shows, a gift from Davis’s father as he was preparing to downsize years ago.

“Technically (drummer Sebastian Schultz) was the third member,” explained Davis, who originally conceived Bad Veins as a solo project. “He was well aware that Irene was part of the band upon entrance.”

Although Davis admits he initially accepted the player reluctantly and shoved it in his basement, Irene is now an essential part of their live shows, providing backing tracks that allow the more ambitious Bad Veins songs to expand beyond two-man instrumentation.

Blast spoke with Davis and Schultz as they attempted to steer their tour van through a “complicated mess of highways” outside Albany, with Schultz driving and Davis navigating and doing phone interviews from the passenger seat. They were en route from Toronto to Danbury, Conn., in the midst of a string of tour dates that followed the release of their self-titled debut album on July 21.

The soaring chorus on first single “Gold and Warm” is a major selling point on its own, but other standout tracks include the catchy “Dryout” and sentimental, contemplative album closer “Go Home.”

The pair, who live a block away from each other in their hometown, became friends as participants in the limited local music scene. Between them, they cite influences ranging from Sigur Ros and the Flaming Lips to Bad Religion and Sunny Day Real Estate.

Since Davis and Schultz formed Bad Veins in 2006, bloggers and other members of the indie rock hype machine have been salivating over the band. In 2007, they were named a breakout act at the annual CMJ music festival in New York and were recently featured on ABC News NOW’s weekly series “Amplified.”

Although the buzz came as a surprise, they didn’t feel it was undeserved, Davis said. But along with the publicity has come some unwanted pressure.

“A band can’t control the expectations people have of them,” Davis pointed out. “I almost feel like it has nothing to do with us. People look at us through this filter of blog hype and it’s kind of unfair. Sometimes you feel like people are … judging you based on what other people are saying and not what you’re doing.”

“We’re just two kids from Cincinnati,” he added. “We’re not saying we’re hot shit. You are.”

It’s probably easy for Davis and Schultz to forget the hype for now, while they’re still booking their own shows and selling their own merchandise – not to mention finding themselves lost in greater New York as they drive themselves to gigs.

But two tollbooths and one request for directions later, it sounded like Schultz had gotten them back on track.

“I don’t have a clue where we are or where we’re going, but i think he’s got it under control,” Davis said.

And with that, we said our goodbyes and Bad Veins proceeded on — presumably towards the Connecticut state line.

Bad Veins tour dates:

August 28 – Austin, Texas @ Emo’s Jr.
August 29 – Dallas, Texas @ The Cavern
August 31 – Phoenix, Ariz. @ Modified Arts
September 1 – San Diego, Calif. @ Casbah*
September 2 – Los Angeles, Calif. @ Spaceland*
September 3 – Costa Mesa, Calif. @ Detroit Bar*
September 4 РSan Francisco, Calif. @ Caf̩ Du Nord*
September 5 – San Jose, Calif. @ Nickel City*
September 6 – Reno, Nev. @ Se7en on West St.*
September 8 – Portland, Ore. @ Doug Fir Lounge*
September 9 – Seattle, Wash. @ Sunset Lounge*
September 10 – Missoula, Mont. @ Palace Billiards*
September 12 – Salt Lake City, Utah @ Kilby Court*
September 13 – Morrison, Colo. @ Monolith Festival
September 14 – Lawrence, Kan. @ Replay Lounge*
September 15 – Chicago, Ill. @ Subterranean*
September 16 – Columbus, Ohio @ Skully’s Music Diner*
September 17 – Washington, D.C. @ DC 9*
September 18 – Allston, Mass. @ O’Brien’s Pub*
September 19 – Brooklyn, N.Y. @ The Bell House*
September 20 – Philadelphia, Pa. @ North Star Bar*
September 22 – Atlanta, Ga. @ 529*
September 24 – Indianapolis, Ind. @ The Vogue Theater

But what did Kennedy actually do? The answer: More than I can possibly detail here. He was the author of more than 2,500 bills and the driving force behind many of the most important liberal initiatives of the past 50 years. His biographer Adam Clymer wrote in 1999 that Kennedy “deserves recognition not just as the leading senator of his time, but as one of the greats in its history.”

If you’re a student dependent on federal loans to attend college, Ted Kennedy was there for you.

If you use a wheelchair and are worried that an employer might discriminate against you, the Americans with Disabilities Act — another Kennedy legacy — will protect you.

If you’re barely scraping by at a minimum-wage job, your wages would be even lower were it not for Kennedy’s tireless efforts on behalf of the working poor.

And though Kennedy never succeeded in his decades-long quest for universal health care, he managed — by working with Republican senators such as his unlikely friend Orrin Hatch of Utah — to extend coverage to poor children who had previously fallen through the cracks.

As Boston Globe reporter Susan Milligan writes, Kennedy’s name also appears on hundreds of bills that don’t necessarily fit with his liberal image, but that helped shape American society in profound ways — from deregulation of the airline industry to helping the second President Bush pass his No Child Left Behind legislation — an action Kennedy came to regret after Bush refused to fund it fully.

And when Bush broke the law by ordering secret, warrantless wiretaps as part of his anti-terrorism efforts, it was a law — the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — that Kennedy had helped write some three decades earlier.

Ted Kennedy was a deeply flawed human being whose many years of boozing and womanizing had, by the early ’90s, made him a symbol of excess. A night of drinking in Palm Beach, Fla., leading to rape charges against his nephew William Kennedy Smith (who was acquitted), nearly ended his career — a career that may well have culminated in the presidency were it not for an earlier scandal over his role in the death of a young campaign aide named Mary Jo Kopechne.

By 1994, Kennedy was on the ropes and vulnerable to a challenge. The Republican candidate that year was Mitt Romney, a telegenic Republican businessman whose crisp soundbites, wholesome lifestyle, and vague if generally liberal agenda seemed more than a match for the aging incumbent.

Yet Kennedy, newly remarried and with his self-acknowledged alcohol problem apparently under control, rose to the occasion, besting Romney in a nationally televised debate at Faneuil Hall in which he brilliantly (if unfairly) invoked the memory of his dead brothers in response to one of Romney’s attacks. (Romney later served as governor of Massachusetts, and ran for president in 2008.)

Kennedy was not above petty politics. I recall following him around Burlington one day in the late 1980s, when I was a reporter for the Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn. Kennedy had just sneaked an amendment into a bill to deny Rupert Murdoch the regulatory waiver he was seeking that would allow him to own both the Boston Herald and WFXT-TV (Channel 25), which Murdoch had just purchased. At every stop, Herald reporter Wayne Woodlief would ask him, “Senator, why are you trying to kill the Herald?”

If Kennedy’s ploy had been aimed at shutting down the Herald, as many suspected, it didn’t work: Murdoch kept the paper and sold the TV station. (Several years later, he sold the Herald to his longtime protégé Pat Purcell and repurchased Channel 25.) The episode led Kennedy’s most caustic critic at the Herald, columnist Howie Carr, to write a particularly memorable lede: “Was it something I said, Fat Boy?”

In a few days, the focus will turn to the question of who will be Kennedy’s successor in the U.S. Senate. The special election that will be held five months from now is likely to be the most wide-open we have seen in Massachusetts since 1984, when Sen. Paul Tsongas retired and was succeeded by John Kerry.

But the next senator from Massachusetts will not match Ted Kennedy’s influence or power. What’s especially sad about his death is that, at his vigorous best, he could have made the difference in President Obama’s push for universal health care, a push that, at the moment, seems to be going nowhere.

Perhaps Democrats and Republicans alike will honor Kennedy’s legacy by coming to an agreement on a bill that will bear his name.

We’re truly excited for this one.

Sorority Row brings back so many memories about college and Greek life and murderous, venomous sorority girls.

It truly is the best time of your life.

In honor of the girls of Theta Pi — and the girls of Northeastern University’s Delta Zeta, Sigma Sigma Sigma, Delta Phi Epsilon, Sigma Delta Tau, and Alpha Epsilon Phi, and we’re sure BU and MIT have sororities — Blast is giving away a slew of free passes to a September 10 7 p.m. showing of Sorority Row here in Boston.

All you have to do is register on the site and comment on this story.

We’re also giving away cups, bottle openers, ping pong balls and posters!

And if you’re a member of Greek life, be sure to post your letters!

Variety is the name of the game in Santa Fe. For example, not only does it boast a proficient gallery scene, you don’t find just the typical Native American arts. There is a span from modern-contemporary paintings and sculpture, photography by the greats, the standards of southwestern art such as Georgia O’Keefe and an interesting sub-genre, the contemporary Native American influenced art. This art is a blend of cave paintings’ old-world lines and grace but with a surprising avant-garde twist. This “new” art is startling and familiar in the same breath, and is the love-child of Santa Fe.

Beginning Labor Day, 2009, Santa Fe will embark on a 16-month long 400 year anniversary festival.  It is to be a celebration of many flavors, offering concerts, farmer’s and artist’s markets, an outdoor cinema series, opera and lectures on the arts. Most of these things are regular occurrences in Santa Fe, and if you know where to look, every day seems like a Fiesta.

Canyon Road, presently a “gallery-mile”, with over 100 galleries, restaurants and artist studios, once existed as an  ancient route of Native Americans between pueblos, as well as served under the foot traffic of Spanish, Confederate and Mexican soldiers and Native American warrior alike. It is a fitting  journey the art-seeker experiences spending an evening on Canyon Road. Fridays are the ideal time to visit, because many of the galleries have receptions, wine tastings and artist appearances.  A handful of the buildings still used actually pre-date the inception of New Mexico as a state in the United States of America, in 1912, some possibly by a century or more.

Santa Fe has the charm and blending of the ages that you find in many smaller European enclaves. However, the city has sophistication, enough so that the New York City art scene has made a second home in the city. Many of the galleries in the Plaza and Canyon Road are the love–children of NYC galleries, or galleries that are now run by transplanted New Yorkers who migrated to Santa Fe in search of its generous serenity. When visiting with these reformed city-dwellers, I found a common emotion was a respect for the art buyer they see in their spaces. They seemed to sense that the viewer in Santa Fe is enabled to view the art in an environment conducive to adoration. It is how Santa Fe affects that sixth sense that is unique.

One of the best ways to experience art while in Santa Fe is to take a short trip to the origins of American art and life. The city is surrounded by the ultimate in American culture. Ruins of once populous Indian pueblo cities are numerous, and petroglyphs and ancient cave dwellings are all a short drive out. Los Alamos, for the history buffs, is also nearby.

With influence from the ancestors of the area, an outdoor life is lived to the fullest by those in Santa Fe. Hiking, camping, skiing and snowboarding are all thrilling ways to live immersed in this philosophy, and the city boasts a central location to any outdoorsman’s desire. The weather is quite temperate, a bit more severe in the winter, which attributes to a healthy combination between summer sports and winter sports. Balance is an inherent quality of this land and in turn offers a destination to satisfy any action-packed palette. After spending the days in the sun, cool off at one of the many cute-but-sexy eateries. Cowgirl’s, just south of the Plaza, offers the fare of the old west and walls covered in historical photos of true Cowgirls. It is cozy, homey and often has a bit of live music, with more of a bar atmosphere post-dinner hours. Another hot spot is El Farol in the Canyon Road district, a South American inspired tapas bar, which often receives rave reviews of its tapas and its live music and dancing.

If you’re feeling a bit lazy, and let’s admit it – after walking the Canyon Road mile, eating the mouth-filling flavorful food, and spending a few days camping, you will be – a day stroll around the Plaza, shopping and seeing the Museums is just the thing you are going to need. The Plaza is a mish-mash of boutique, art galleries, shops, museums and eclectic vendors. The local Native American craftsmen often gather outside of the Palace of the Governors to sell their handmade jewelry and wares as they have for hundreds of years. At the center of the Plaza is a wonderful garden to cool off and reflect on the energies that allow this oasis in the desert to thrive and invigorate.

Santa Fe is a surprising, energizing place. When you visit, you are imbibed with the healing energy of this grotto in the Land of Enchantment. In each step walked on ground that has served our land and its peoples for centuries, you march towards a bigger sense of the world around you, both in aesthetics and organics.  Santa Fe is a retreat that broadens your horizons, and deepens the connection between yourself and the world around you.

Skip down to the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Massachusetts Avenue and cool off with some of the best and most refreshing cocktails and sashimi plates in the city.

Uni Sashimi Bar and Lounge may be extremely cozy (read: tiny) but it is definitely the hippest sushi spot in Beantown. Executive chef and co-owner Ken Oringer, also of the innovative South End tapas restaurant Toro, has let go of all inhibition and explored new territory when it comes to sashimi, seafood and ambiance. In addition, the service was impeccable from the hostess, to both our waitresses, to the owners themselves. The staff was not only knowledgeable regarding every single dish they placed on the sushi bar, but they were friendly and extremely attentive.

Uni is located right inside Clio, the restaurant at the Hotel Eliot on Commonwealth Avenue. Clio serves up inventive French-American cuisine, and Uni, directly off the hotel’s lobby, compliments it nicely. Sashimi chef and co-owner Chris Chung was on fire the night a friend and I stopped by for some pleasantly refreshing drinks and fusion sashimi that made my mouth water at the very first glance of the menu descriptions.

Our first course, Hirame (fluke for any sushi-neophytes out there) with toasted garlic was delicious. The fish was fresh and light, and the citrus flavors played nicely against the wonderfully strong and aromatic garlic which is a staple in many of the dishes (as it should be because it added so many levels of flavor to the different fish).

The seaweed salad here is inventive, if not directly up my alley. Unlike the standard bright electric green, uniformly sized strands of seaweed that appear in every single salad I have ordered in this fair city, the seaweed salad at Uni has a variety of different sizes, colors and textures of the ocean delicacy. It has a slightly bitter flavor and is perfect for anyone seeking to try a new take on this Japanese restaurant staple. It features four seaweeds with soy sauce, brown rice vinegar and tuna flakes adding a strong salty oceanic flavor.

Something that was truly another standout was the Rock Shrimp Tempura seasoned with spicy red pepper aioli and Korean pepper threads. It was delicious and perfectly fried. It was popcorn shrimp on steroids (the good kind, whatever they might be). These bite-sized morsels were definitely not for the faint of heart, packing a very spicy kick. They’re also not for anyone on a diet.

Another great standout in my mind was the octopus, a sashimi fish rarely eaten by the unadventurous sushi enthusiast. The way  Chung prepared the delicacy, it was mild and delicious. The octopus, sliced quarter-thin, had great texture and was drizzled with wonderful chili oil (and of course that toasted garlic we can’t get enough of).

One of my absolute favorite dishes was surprisingly simple, decadent and completely and utterly refreshing on that exceptionally hot and humid July day: the spicy lobster salad. It was phenomenal. It boasted papaya, perfect lobster meat and that wondrous toasted garlic again. It was heavenly and the perfect thing to cool off on a hot summer’s night.

And not only is it my favorite dish, it happens to be sashimi Chung’s favorite dish as well.

“The idea for this salad original is derived from the traditional Thai salad Som Tum,” Chung said. He believes that the freshness of the fish is the most important thing.

“My cooking method is to use traditional flavors and techniques and add in a touch of French cooking technique,” he said.

Some ingredients Chris often utilizes behind the sashimi bar at Uni include soy sauce, yuzu, and fleur de sel. He also feels that using seasonal vegetables and fish will result in the best meal possible.

Fellow dancer and sushi-lover Vanessa and I were seated on the edge of the sushi bar and couldn’t help but shimmy and tap our feet to the restaurant’s soundtrack. The music was a fun variety including some hip hop, pop and Latin hits, including a personal favorite, Juanes’ “A Dios Le Pido.” When Oringer stopped by to say hello to us, he let us know his wife had created the playlist and I had to commend her taste, in both music and men (Ken is the epitome of surfer-cute with medium-length brown hair, a five o’clock shadow and a sweet demeanor).

Of course, I can’t forget about the fun summer cocktails – the perfect pick me up, or relax me down drinks – on this exceptionally humid day. The Ginko-Bai artfully showcased plum-infused and Asian pear sake with a mountain peach and sugared rim. It was delicious, light and not too strong which is a must for any summer alcoholic beverage.

We ended the meal with two desserts, the standout being the Strawberry Fields dessert (can anyone say Strawberry Fields forever, and hopefully ever and ever?!). This dish of fresh sliced strawberries and wonderfully light and delicious cocoa “soil” and coconut sorbet with rose dew was divine. The rose dew used is perfection because I have never been so excited about a dessert, ever. Usually, I’m disappointed and left too full with an unsatisfied sweet-tooth.

The Frozen Capsule of Bing Cherry and Amaretto Toffee packed a fun surprise with the toffee spilling luxuriously out of the center. It was pretty good, but not even a close second to the Strawberry Fields dream-dessert status.

This is a great date spot; it’s intimate and fun with inventive dishes that are thought-provoking as well as palate-enticing. Creativity is often overlooked in Japanese cuisine so it’s great to see a Boston restaurant embrace innovation and create new dishes using the freshest products and ingredients we may not typically expect to pop up in our sashimi.

And, Uni is partaking in Restaurant Week for those on a budget, happening now. Their first course offerings include a spicy shrimp salad with cucumber, mango, lime and chili or yellowfin tuna with sweet onions, sesame, seaweed and pickled mung bean (so much yummier than it sounds!). Their entree choices feature a slow poached Scottish salmon prepared with yuzu salsa and served with an organic rice ball, kobe short rib with a side of spicy cabbage salad and chirashi with the chef’s choice of exotic sashimi fish and various vegetables.

So if your feeling a little too hot under the collar, skip down to the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Massachusetts Avenue and cool off with some of the best and most refreshing cocktails and sashimi plates in the city.

BLAST: How about you tell our readers a bit about ChAIR?

Donald Mustard: We formed ChAIR a little over four years ago, with the intent to create really awesome games and really cool intellectual properties to create and control to set those games in. Our first game was Undertow for the Xbox 360, and just next week we’re coming out with Shadow Complex, which we’re very excited about.

About a year ago, we were purchased by Epic Games. We are now a subsidiary, part of the Epic family. That is so awesome for us, because Epic came in, and gave us all of the time and resources and expertise that we needed to create a really powerful game. The awesome part about being part of Epic is that we get access to the Unreal Engine 3, which is, in our opinion, the very best game technology that’s ever been created. We love using it, and that’s a huge advantage to being part of the Epic family.

BLAST: Shadow Complex has a deeper story than many sidescrollers and other games in the genre, which makes sense given you have Peter David working on it. Tell us a little about how you get Peter to work on it, and on the story itself.

DM: The story of Shadow Complex takes place in our Empire universe. About two years ago, we released a novel called Empire by Orson Scott Card. The novel is about a second civil war breaking out in the United States in the near future, and the ramifications of what that would entail. The story of Shadow Complex runs parallel to the events of that novel and sets up a lot of the events to the sequel to that novel, Hidden Empire, which will come out this December.

Shadow Complex is reminiscent of some of our favorite games from the past, like Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, games that are all about exploration and this environment that you’re placed into. One of the challenges that we wanted to take on in Shadow Complex was to layer in more story than we have seen in those games in the past. We thought it would be awesome to partner with something who understood quick, concise dialogue, and we thought “Who better to do that then a comic book writer” They really have to marry their words with a strong visual style, similar to games in many ways.

We don’t see any reason not to set our sights high, so we made a list of our favorite comic book writers of all time, and Peter David was at the very top of that list. We were able to get in contact with his agent, and through that we got his phone number and we called him up. We talked to him about what we were thinking about Shadow Complex, and what the ideas were, and he really loved the idea of it so we were able to somehow convince him to come and partner with us in writing the story and script. We think the end result is just awesome, he did an amazing job of creating a compelling narrative with cool characters, but still allowed for so much of that open-world freedom that we kind of needed in the game.

BLAST: I see a bit of Metroid Fusion in this title as well, since that game had more story and you have the voices coming in over the walkie and such, in a similar way. How did you prepare for that game, as the play style—even though it does its own things as well—it mirrors them [Super Metroid & Metroid Fusion]; did you do anything special to prepare for that?

DM: For us, for everyone at the company, Metroid, Super Metroid, Zero Mission, and Metroid Fusion are some of our favorite games of all time. And we just saw this hole in the genre. I’ve been waiting almost 15 years for someone to make a new console version of these exploratory sidescrollers. Imagine if no one made a first-person shooter for 15 years, how weird that would be. Then 15 years later, Call of Duty 10 comes out; after 15 years, how fresh do you think that would feel? We decided that no one is making these games, even though they are so awesome, so when we finished Undertow we decided it was a great opportunity to take a stab at creating this type of game. That’s what we set out to do. So at the very beginning of the development process, we looked at the Metroid games to see what they did right, and what we thought they did wrong, and how to bring them back with a re-design and modernize it with everything we’ve learned in the last 15-20 years about game design about pacing and narrative flow, and then fuse that with the very best game technology that we have. The Unreal Engine, bringing in all the graphics and AI and all the things we can do now in modern games. We’re pretty happy with the result, but it remains to be see–you can answer this question better than we can—were we able to take the old and create something that was fresh and new for gamers today?

Geremy Mustard: One of our goals along those lines was—well those types of games are still out on handhelds, like the Game Boy—but that’s a pretty niche market, for the kinds of people that remember those types of games, and we wanted to really bring it to the next generation and bring it to the new generation that has been weaned on Halo and the modern first-person shooters, and we wanted to make that type of game accessible to those kinds of players as well. Hopefully that will be the case.

BLAST: Do you have any kind of insight or idea as to why this type of game disappeared from consoles for 15 years?

DM: Super Metroid came out in 1994, and then in ‘95, the Playstation came out, and then everything was 3D, 3D, 3D. The idea that a sidescroller, no matter what the design was, could be successful, went away. Now, as games have become more mature, and the technology has become more mature, the platforms have matured; look at what Microsoft is doing with Xbox Live Arcade. It creates opportunities for all kinds of games being developed, regardless of the design. There is really an opportunity now for any kind of game to be developed on these next-gen systems regardless of where you set the camera.

BLAST: One thing I noticed while playing is that Shadow Complex looks like it’s set up for speed runs, which is kind of interesting given that speed runs seem to be one of those things where you exploit the design. You even have an achievement for completing a speed run.

DM: We do! One of those things we have fond memories of was the ability to do speed runs in games and sequence break them. While I will always believe in my heart that while I was speed running Metroid and sequence breaking Metroid that no game designer ever intended for that to happen…I think they intended for that to happen, and they made the game support it. So we thought, “Of course we have to support that.” Of course we have to allow the technology to even consider that someone out there will think of ways to break things that we never even thought of, and so we wanted to make sure that we could support it and allow them to complete their game however they want to figure it out. So because we decided to support that, it allowed for some really awesome stuff to happen, and as we ran through the testing process of the game we started to see all the cool ways to speed run the game and sequence break the game, and we allowed that to stay in. So yeah, you can absolutely speed run the game really, really fast if you know where everything is and you’ve played it several times and leveled up your character even enough to unlock some of the really cool secrets and abilities we have to assist you in speed running. A lot of that is built in.

GM: Honestly we see that as one of the coolest forms of replayability that we have in our game, and that these types of games have. Even though you’re kind of playing through the same experience, it’s quite different as you try to play in different ways. Obviously you can see from the older games, people continue to play Super Metroid to try to do speed runs and sequence breaking, there are all kinds of videos on YouTube and stuff about that. We know it’s a very valid form of replayability to get value out of the game, so we wanted to support that as well as we could.

DM: Geremy’s right; playing the game in new ways almost creates an entirely new game experience. Some of these people, after they beat the game a few times, will be able to reach the foam earlier in the game, and will be able to beat the game with just their foam and the pistol. That is a completely different gameplay experience than any other way of playing the game, it’s almost like a new game at that point. There’s some really cool stuff for players that are more interested in finding new stuff to discover and interact with in the game in new and unique ways, it can really extend the life of the game.

BLAST: So the game comes out Wednesday, if it’s successful do you see yourself doing anything else like this in the future? Any other style of throwback, or more in the Metroid/Shadow Complex style of game?

DM: The short answer is we would love to. We love the challenge of making this kind of game, and through the creative process we learned so much about how to create these kind of non-linear, exploratory games. If a game like this can take off, not only would we love the opportunity to create more games like this, but what I really hope is that other people would make games like this. The one problem with Shadow Complex is that Geremy and I already know where everything is! We don’t ever get to play it and enjoy a fresh, new Metroidvania style next-gen game. I hope someone else will make it so that I get to play. Uh, not another Shadow Complex though [laughter]. You know what I mean.

At the end of the day, we are beholden to what gamers want. If they want it, we’ll make more.

GM: We have some sweet ideas for a sequel to Shadow Complex, so if your readers want it, tell them to go buy the game. [laughter] [Editor's Note: Go buy the game.]

Shadow Complex releases Wednesday, August 19 for XBLA at 1200 Microsoft Points. You can read our review here.

Listeners?

“Fans,” Oliveira clarified. “Let’s call them fans.”

It was just after noon on what seemed like hottest Saturday of the year, and one thing was already certain: The guy knows how to knock back a cold one long before it turns warm. He also knows his strengths as a radio personality. Words roll off his tongue as if he had a six-figure audience there to hold onto each one. He’s not fishing for laughs, but he is listening to himself.

If I ran golf, it would be a full-contact sport, said Special Ed (Blast staff photo/Sarah Gordon)

“The Washington Redskins and the New England Patriots are complete cosmic opposites,” Oliveira mused at one point, invisible fists raised in anguish to the football gods. Other deep thoughts: “Satellite radio is already dead,” and “mixed martial arts is the pinnacle of full-contact spectator sports.”

He gets even better later on: “If I ran golf, it would be a full-contact sport. All players would carry a quiver of the four basic clubs and travel on foot. It would be survivalist golf. There would be no waiting. An opponent can sneak up behind you while you’re putting and break your legs with his driver, and you’d lose.”

Fine craft brews aside, this is more professionalism than narcissism. And it helps that Special Ed is actually quick and funny. He verbalizes thoughts, tries out material, comes back to talking points for another go-round. At least the cute waitress in the sundress and the menu-challenged ladies to his left are within earshot. They’re getting a free show, and they don’t even know it.

Consider this rehearsal, then. For the past two years, Ed has acted as one-third of The Sandbox, WFNX’s uncharacteristic attempt at a talk-centric morning radio show in the Boston market. The move was met with some criticism. How can the historically musical FNX justify a four-hour broadcast with maybe a dozen rock songs thrown in to break up the banter? This is the station that broke The Pixies. Kurt Cobain was an avid listener. You know, “Boston’s True Alternative?” As it is, this clogged market is rampant with humor-and-talk teams: Toucher and Rich on WBCN, Ramir and Pebbles on JAM’N 94.5, Opie and Anthony on Sirius/XM, Howard Stern, etc. With such immense pressure and competition, it’s easy to see why Oliveira never actually drops the routine. In truth, there isn’t one.

“I can’t turn it off,” he said. “I’m not playing a character at all. The Special Ed you hear on the radio is 100 percent genuine. Off the air, I’m still that same asshole.”

That’s hardly an understatement, though one would be tempted to apply “lovable” as a modifier for that self-given title. “Fearless,” too. For what other New England semi-celebrity would call the sport of baseball “boring and outdated” and riff on his “newly instilled sense of annoyance for the Boston Red Sox” that comes along every summer? Oliveira has lived in Boston only a little more than two years, but this apparent cultural divide illuminates his overall appeal. Like much of The Sandbox’s young-and-hip listenership, Oliveira admitted Boston may not be his permanent home, but in the meantime, he hates the Green Line for the same reasons as the rest of us and is no stranger to the phrase “Boozy Mick.” The only difference is that it’s part of his job to talk about it.

“I don’t find many of the aspects of Boston pride all that sacred,” Oliveira said. “I think we aim to attract an overall intelligent audience — a more worldly audience than just Boston. It’s a great market and a great town, and FNX is a great station. But our industry’s so weird right now that it’s hard to tell where it’s going. If you wanna be a movie star, you go to L.A. If you wanna be a radio guy, you go where the work is.”

This is exactly what he did in the summer of 2007. Along with co-hosts Charlie Padgett and Dustin “Fletcher” Matthews, Oliveira was transplanted from WYDL in Richmond, Virginia to take over Michael Swayze’s popular morning rock show on FNX. Since the transition, music for the time-slot has been cut down to “maybe four songs an hour,” while a wide array of topics are discussed each day in a rapid-fire call-in format: News, sports, politics, movies, music or “basically whatever we feel like,” Matthews said.

Dustin “Fletcher” Matthews (pictured) and Oliveira are roommates in Allston (Blast staff photo/Sarah Gordon)

Among the trio’s talk are special guests, interviews, comic bits and commercials. The latter is probably the most significant change from the show’s birth as a podcast in Virginia, besides then being able to swear. Oliveira (whose real last name is d’Oliveira), Matthews and Padgett worked at WYDL doing marketing, afternoons and mornings respectively. They started The Sandbox as a podcast in 2004.

“We were never live before FNX,” Oliveira said. “The original idea was just to have an excuse to goof off, swear and drink. But people listened. We were in three different states at one point, and thanks to Skype, we were still able to record the show together, as if we were all in the same room.”

The three low-on-the-totem-pole radio employees would not have had the chance to do a podcast at all had it not been for WYDL higher-up Mike Murphy. “Mike was the buffer between the people behind the boardroom doors and our shenanigans,” Matthews said. “He made it possible for our podcast to exist.”

Despite the blessing from Murphy, Matthews (who is Ed’s roommate) maintains that “the funniest stuff happened off-air, like when we built a bathroom in Mike’s office.” The team installed restroom amenities like a toilet and a faucet, not to mention a fully operational plumbing system, in a room that was big enough for only Murphy’s desk and bookshelf. Murphy was simultaneously confused and amused. While not a gag that would work well on radio, one has to admire the anarchic inventiveness.

The youngest host of the show, Fletcher Matthews stuck to bottles of Miller High Life, sporting plastic lime-green wayfarer knockoffs to rival the kitschy impact of Special Ed’s aviators. The conversation veered off to the recent Best Music Poll free concert, to the The Gaslight Anthem, to the gruff Midwest punk bands that somehow instantly unite their common listeners. The back deck of Deep Ellum was once again bathed in sunlight and populated by groups of attractive drinkers soaking in the vitamin D as their livers do the alcohol. There was not a microphone in sight but Oliveira and Matthews appear in their element. A surprising amount of their rapport later winds up as asides on the following day’s show. The waitress — same as before — brings over each new longneck as the previous one’s frothy final gulp is about to be consumed.

Clearly comfortable with each other, the Sandbox guys know how to make an impression. But they weren’t so lucky upon their initial meetings with WFNX as the station searched for a possible new morning show.

“It was a long, slow hiring process,” Oliveira said. “But the beautiful thing about FNX is that they don’t think just like a radio company.”

Matthews chimes in: “They are very protective of their workplace and the people are passionate about what they’re doing. They have a huge standard for quality and a demanding audience to maintain. You know the FNX audience is tough to impress. It’s like, ‘Oooo … we all love Roxy Music.’”

Challenges presented themselves early for the trio. At one grueling interview in Boston, the General Manager was an hour-and-a-half late. “He barges in the board room,” Oliveira said, “and says verbatim to us, ‘Sorry I’m late but I don’t give a shit about any of this.”

According to Fletcher and Ed, even Henry Santoro, a radio veteran and longtime WFNX stalwart, was initially unimpressed. “I’m not kidding,” Oliveira said, “but he said he wasn’t interested in any of our ’small-market bullshit.’ Unless we made some changes.”

That request was honored, and Matthews, Oliveira and Padgett got the job. They broadcast the first Sandbox show on July 23, 2007. The initial response from the public was overwhelmingly negative, as is the norm for regular radio listeners to throw their arms up in defiance at the first sign of change. Fast forward two years and Santoro is now a regular on the show. “They told us, ‘Oh, and you also get Henry. He just sort of comes with the station,’” Oliveira said. “Despite the fact that he’s sort of just a piece of furniture that hangs out in the studio, he eventually became a father figure for us on the show.”

Co-host Charlie Padgett confirmed Santoro’s status. “The only thing that makes Santoro ‘legendary,’” he said, “is the fact that he has managed to hold down the same job for 26 years by doing the absolute minimum amount of work possible.”

Padgett is a little older than Matthews, a little younger than Oliveira, and is referred to as the “vanilla” one by his colleagues. Case in point, he was absent from the afternoon bar trip because he was taking his wife and kid fishing. But he defines his role in the group a little differently. “Just because I don’t live in an apartment with outdoor-carpeting indoors doesn’t mean I’m ‘vanilla,’ he says. “I got my rock n’ roll lifestyle out of my system 10 years ago, when I was single, sort of good-looking and in halfway decent shape.”

If anything, Charlie rounds out the ball-busting dynamic that has helped The Sandbox quickly establish a loyal audience. There’s a certain affection to the extended arguments on the show that shows up in conversation. “Ask Ed,” Padgett said, “who’s 38 by the way, how many times he has been asleep in the floor of the green room on a Tuesday morning compared to how many times I have been asleep in the floor of the green room. And no one can be as hipster-awesome as Fletcher. ‘Ooooooh! I only go to bars that take cash!’ Get out of here. Give me a corner booth, a decent-looking waitress and a few hours and I’ll show you a good time.”

Or just hand the man a microphone.

Now, distinguished guests like Loveline’s Dr. Drew and the comedian Gary Gulman champion their experiences as some of their favorites. Oliveira is particular taken by Dr. Drew. “If it were up to me,” he says, “I would replace Charlie with Dr. Drew any day.”

Still, the rag-tag dynamic and speed of high-energy talk radio remains, The Sandbox having come into its own recently pretty much by just being itself. “It comes down to this,” Matthews said. “There’s no sleeping in. We have a show to do. But there’s a constant dog pile mentality. If there’s any sign of weakness on-air, you jump on it until it’s crushed.”

“We are all such sensitive babies who constantly criticize our own work,” Oliveira added. “A normal person would be reduced to tears.”

The guys insist that whatever they have to offer is either self-taught or at least affectionately derivative. These guys were raised on Howard Stern, whom they idolize, but The Sandbox possesses an attitude all its own. The hosts are engaged in a “love fest” with Sam Yoon that involves the ringing of a gong each time the candidate is on air. They think it would be funny to do a segment called “We Need More Black Friends.” They had Fletcher do a serious review of the animated 80s version of Transformers: The Movie, where their “Bah Weep” slogan originated. See? It’s natural.

“I went to the University of Tennessee for like a weekend,” Matthews siad. “It was pointless. There’s no guarantee to be successful on the radio and you can’t just learn it at some media studies program. Are you a hard worker that’s good on the air? Then you’ll be successful. That’s it.”

It also helps if you can put away a dozen beers before 3 p.m. and still be able to shoot the shit on a summer’s day. As if it were your job or something.

Alana Levinson and John M. Guilfoil of the Blast staff contributed to this report — mostly drinking.

Ducharme finished filming the pilot of a new series called “Destination Matters,” produced by Shodan Productions. Ducharme says he just went on a casting call for the part and got a callback saying they were interested.

He plays the lead character, Jason who travels back in time 10 years, and becomes 17 again. He wakes up with no memory of who he is or why he‘s there. His character tries putting the pieces of his life together and tries to figure out why he’s suddenly being chased by the FBI. Parts of his future are revealed to the viewers, who along with Jason, try to find out where he comes from. The pilot was filmed in and around the Boston area and in parts of Quincy.

Ducharme, a 2002 Wayland High School graduate, said acting was never part of his plan. He was a three-sport athlete, on the soccer, rugby and ski teams. Ducharme said growing up in Wayland was like growing up in any typical small town.

“I graduated with no more than 175 students and everyone knew everyone,” Ducharme said.

When he was in eighth grade, Ducharme started playing paintball. Eventually this interest grew into something more serious than just a hobby. He started traveling around the country and even across seas as part of two competitive paintball teams. By the time he was a freshman at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst he began playing professionally. He played for the now-defunct National Professional Paintball League. After a few years, he switched teams and began playing for NXL which was run by Paintball Sports Promotion. He was majoring in mechanical engineering at UMass and was shooting paintballs for his part-time job.

“I made enough to have it has a job in college,” said Ducharme. He got paid for each event as well as a flat stipend. He also got paid based on team performance. It was then that he got a taste of the media spotlight and the entertainment industry for the first time after his paintball team was featured on ESPN.

”My family supports me 100 percent and have always supported me with all the crazy stuff I do,” he said. After graduating college Ducharme made the decision to go to Colorado, with just a car and no place to live. He eventually landed a job and spent a year as a ski ambassador.

Ducharme’s interest in acting developed from experience he had in modeling during college. One of his paintball teammates had become involved in modeling, and thought Ducharme should give it a try.

“I’m up for anything,” Ducharme said. So he gave it a shot. His first photo shoot was for a paintball company. He met his current manager through a modeling gig, who eventually suggested acting classes. He began going on casting calls and started landing minor roles in independent films. Most recently he was in “Shanked” and “The intensive.” Both were submitted into some upcoming film festivals.

“(Acting) takes a lot to get used to,” Ducharme said. “Days can be as long as 14 hours, to only use 30 seconds of footage.” But he has enjoyed taking on a new endeavor and looks forward to taking on more roles in the future.

Although Ducharme said he’s up for any challenges that may come his way in the acting field or anything else, he’s still not giving up his day job, working with automated robots for a pharmaceutical company. He really enjoys that.

Ducharme is currently living in South Boston, he but plans to make the move to New York City soon. There is no exact date or network set yet for the “Destination Matters” pilot to air.

While most children raised by the book recall fondly the adventures of Max through the jungles of the “wild things,” others remember it for its heated controversy over the disposition placed upon parents as incompetent to the “animal” behavior of the Max character. But despite all the ruckus the book managed to survive the scandal and earn the love of children everywhere who dared to go “Where the Wild Things Are.”

This week, latest trailer for the film go public, and once again it illustrates only a sample of what will certainly prove to gain critical acclaim. According to Maurice Sendak, himself, in the behind-the-scenes footage, the film will be as controversial as the books. From the material provided it is clear there will be a contrast between the world of him imaginings and the real world full of complex issues; issues including the relationships Max’s mother has with other men to the way Max copes with the confusion by biting people.

Based upon how Jonze has depicted his somewhat unconventional protagonists in his films like “Being John Malkovich” where the main character Craig Schwartz deals with his dismal life. Jonze is able to extrapolate the whole internal psychosis by projecting it with the legendary actor John Malkovich. The film is simply more than a story about a man’s escape, it’s more of a reflection on the way individuals cope with certain stages of their lives such as married life or work.

The importance in looking at Jonze’s work as any sort of indicator for “Where the Wild Things Are” will allow audiences to gain a sense of where the story will dictate itself. Certainly, one of the main important factors of Maurice Sendak’s work is the significance of deep emotions from early childhood such as depression or anger issues. Before the book, the image of childhood was very two dimensional as often the image of maturity was left to characters such as Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. Children were never in the right, and the adults were always the authorities.

What Jonze seems to convey in the limited amount of footage is that same sort of depth riddled throughout “Where the Wild Things Are.” It is likely we will see the strains of Max’s relationship with his mother in a more discerning light. It is likely we will watch the world of Max’s imagination shatter or merge with his bitter reality. And whether one has read the book or not, this film will prove to be one of those surprising and insightful films that will get people talking this fall.

Although one shouldn’t count any proverbial chickens before they hatch, Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are” is worth the bet! And lastly, a deserving nod should be given to Max Records, whose shared name with the main character of Max, will steal audiences attention as he gives a memorable performance.

But with recent release of her second album, “The Redemption,” Hogan is looking to change all that. In doing so, she faces the unenviable struggle of wanting to detach herself from her personal problems and focus on her music career, despite knowing that those family struggles may be the primary reason people are interested in her songs to begin with.

“I’m working now towards just being able to hold my own and have respect from people,” Hogan said in a recent interview. “It’s not that I want to be swarmed with paparazzi all the time for the attention. … I’m not just, you know, Paris Hilton trying to get out there.”

“The Redemption” is, for the most part, a standard autotune-heavy R&B/pop record whose songs would seamlessly blend into the playlist on any Top 40 station around the country. Single “Hey Yo” is catchy enough, as is “Ruff Me Up,” featuring rapper Flo Rida, but the latter is also a blatant, nearly plagiaristic ripoff of Britney Spears’ “Womanizer.”

In case anyone needed a refresher, the minute-long “Intro” kicks off the album with a jarring mishmash of news clips highlighting the tumultuous past two years in Brooke Hogan’s life — from her brother’s jail time as a result of a car accident that left a family friend nearly brain dead, to her parents’ messy divorce, and more recently, public trash-talking episodes between Brooke and her mother, Linda.

“I’ve been through so much crap these past two years, and life has been really hard,” she said. “I’ve kept my head up, (but) it’s been tough. I feel like now … I’m surrounded by people that love me. Even though it’s a small, select group, I really have true friends and I’m really just happy. I love where I’m at in life, so I feel like God is redeeming me. This is my redemption.” (That religious theme is reinforced both on the album’s much-maligned cover art, which features Brooke as a cartoonish, muscular angel.)

The sex kitten image that Hogan projects on other songs like “BeDDable” and the sizzling, sultry kickoff track “Strip” (“I wanna see you strip for me / Take it off, off honey / Wanna see your body”) seems inconsistent with her portrayal as a slightly naïve, girl next door type on her VH1 reality show, “Brooke Knows Best” — a notion she immediately brushes off.

“I’m not saying that the reality show is fake or real,” she hedges. “It is whatever it is. But, whatever you see on TV is like one percent of my life.”

Of “Strip,” in particular, she remarks: “Everybody wants to, you know, have sex and be sexy and whatever.”

Maybe so, but the dichotomy between her TV and album personas unfortunately makes both seem less than genuine.

More PG-13 is “Falling,” the formulaic collaboration between Hogan and her boyfriend, rapper Stack$. Although the pair try to keep their relationship private, Hogan said the song is one of her proudest moments on the record.

“It’s definitely a turn-on to see your boyfriend or girlfriend … when they put on their business hat,” she said. “It’s fun for us. Instead of going to the movies, we go into the studio.”

In spite of her pointed distancing of herself from Paris Hilton, Hogan recognizes that there are detractors who say she, too, is trying to parlay her family name into a career in showbiz. But she swiftly and confidently dismisses her critics, quickly pointing out that she’s a professionally trained singer and pianist, who counts Teddy Pendergrass, Luther Vandross and Stevie Wonder among her musical influences.

“There’s a lot of kids that just think that they can be famous or whatever because their family’s famous,” she said. “(Performing) was really just something that I loved to do. I love music. And maybe my dad’s entertainment genes are passed down through me, but look at Goldie Hawn and (her daughter) Kate Hudson. Sometimes it runs in the blood. … It’s just the nature of the beast. You can’t really hate on it.”

Growing up in the Tampa suburb of Clearwater, Florida, Brooke and her younger brother Nick were generally kept out of the spotlight by their parents. In fact, ‘Hulk’ and Linda Hogan were quite the opposite of stage parents, shielding Brooke and Nick from the spotlight and resisting the urge to permanently relocate to Hollywood. (Incidentally, I attended the same Catholic elementary school as the siblings, a few grades ahead of them, back when they were known as the Bolleas, their father’s given name, so as not to attract unwanted attention.)

“My parents gave us a really normal childhood,” Hogan confirmed, adding that it was her own decision to pursue a career in music. “We were literally (in a) one-mile radius between our house and school. And anything we did on the weekends was with our friends from school. It was really just very secluded. Of course we traveled and stuff like that, but they didn’t make it, like, a big deal. They didn’t ever really over-explain what red carpets were, paparazzi and stuff like that. We were just kind of clueless. We just kind of went along for the ride.’

BLAST: In the past, Madden on Wii was visually behind its hi-def console cousins. What prompted the complete overhaul of the look and style?

Tim Spangler: One thing we wanted to do with the Madden product coming back to [EA] Tiburon was to create a unique visual style that would stand out among all of the other Madden’s out there. As soon as you pop in our disc, you’ll notice a lot of changes from a visual standpoint. You’ve got all new character designs, all new stadiums, all new fields, all new interface presentation, and all of it specifically designed to make the most of the Wii hardware.

BLAST: It looks kind of arcade-y to me, but in a good way. You have this realistic game attached to an arcade look. What inspired you to go down that road?

TS: In terms of visuals, there was a Coke commercial that came out around the time of the Olympics, and it had LeBron James and Yao Ming on it. They went into this festival thing that was all about the matchups, and basketball, and the Olympics, and it was this comic book looking, stylized characters, and we looked at that, and at the same time…it’s not right when Team Fortress did it, but Team Fortress was getting huge around that time. We looked at that, and our goals were to differentiate. Team Fortress had very similar challenges, being a stylized first-person shooter in a genre that’s known for a lot of realistic gameplay. So, we look at those two as our two main inspiration points. We also looked at toys, graphic novels, films, stuff like that.

BLAST: With Grand Slam Tennis, EA showed a willingness to go with style over realism. Now that a flagship title like Madden has been altered in the same way, can we expect this to be the norm on Wii in sports games?

TS: I can’t really speak for EA Sports as a label, but I know in general we’re trying to make a real strong presence on the Wii console. I would say that if titles like Grand Slam Tennis and Madden do well, and people enjoy them, then we will make more products like them.

BLAST: Let’s hear some details about specific changes, like the player’s bodies. What are they like now?

TS: In years past, you couldn’t really tell the difference between Brian Urlacher and Peyton Manning from the silhouettes, they looked the same. In our game, we tried to say, across the board, what types of body types would you need to excel at certain positions.  So what we did is we studied that frame at pre-play, and then we said, “Okay, we need wide receivers and defensive backs.” With those guys, we wanted a tall, thin, think of a Randy Moss. He’s the prototype kind of guy that plays the position. Then inject some personality into them, like big hands, colorful gloves, big feet. Then you’ve got your quarterback, he’s kind of your broad shouldered, classic pocket-passer, the leader of the team. You’ve got your linebacker, he’s the muscular guy that will knock your block off. You can tell as soon as you see him that he wants to knock your head off. You’ve got your linemen, they look like a hulking mass. They are your blockers, and they are guys you don’t want to get hit by either. And also, with the running backs, we wanted to have a guy you could look at and say, “Hey his legs are kind of big.” Someone like LaDainian Tomlinson, Michael Turner type guys. They are still kind of big, but at the same time they are fast and elusive and low to the ground. So we took that philosophy, and tried to emphasize that in the art with the curves and an overall design that would emphasize those characteristics.

From there, we built our environments around those characters. So we can inject that same personality into the stadium. You can see the Broncos stadium here, they took that same horse and then stylized it so it felt like a natural extension of the overall look.

BLAST: Tell me a bit more about the stadiums.

TS: All of the stadiums were built from the ground up. Every stadium has some type of design element…the Broncos have the horse that sits up there and the mountains that surround it. So we took those, and stylized the mountains, stylized the horse. The Bucs have that pirate ship, we took that, injected a bit of personality into that, increased the scale so it dominates that end of the field, did a little play on the palm trees, stuff like that. So we really tried to find those points where the architects had design elements, bring those elements into our world and make them a natural extension of what we’re doing with the players.

BLAST: The stadiums look huge, they just have this big open space and it looks like there are 200,000 people sitting in the stands. Let’s talk about the menus a bit. That’s the team select screen… do all of the menus and interfaces look different like that now?

TS: Yup. So for all our new modes for this year, we’ve gone with a big, bold, polished look that’s pointer-friendly, very colorful, and easy to interact with. We took that approach when designing the interface for this game.

BLAST: With a revamping of the visual style, it’s clear the hope is to attract more people to the Wii version of the game. What do you think will resonate with gamers new to the series, as well as veterans?

TS: For new people, we tried to make it easy to pick up and play. There’s not a huge, steep learning curve here, but at the same time there’s enough depth where we have our different play modes and different levels of difficulty that veterans can enjoy it too. One thing we did for passing, where in years past it was a lot of complicated gestures that you would have to memorize, we tried to simplify that down. With point-and-pass this year, you press A to hike the ball, point at a receiver to lock onto him, and tap A to lob it or press it and hold real fast for a bullet pass right to him. It’s pretty easy to pick up and play. Also, for the new people on the franchise, we’ve got a co-op mode called Huddle Up. There, that’s like a father/son game. They don’t need to know much about football, they can pick up and play without worrying about complexity. Their kid can jump in and knock down pursuers with the IR. It’s the same thing on defense, you can knock down defenders to take them off of their route, knock blockers out of the way.

Also in new game modes we have Road to the Superbowl. It’s similar to a season, it’s all about getting to the Superbowl, but you can customize how you want to play. You can play that standard 11 on 11, or you can play 5 on 5. You can play half a season, a whole season, or start right in the playoffs. We give you those opportunities as well. We also have Showdown mode, to see who is King of the Couch, see who is the best player in the room. And there we have game changers, which are different ways to play the game: fumbleitis, always turbo, it’s alive, different ways to customize the game for how you want to play.

BLAST: So you have got an arcade product with realistic properties we’re used to from Madden in the same package. That gives people with access to more than one platform reason to pick up both or just the Wii one.

TS: Yes, exactly.

Thanks to Tim Spangler for answering our questions. We will have a preview of Madden NFL Wii for you in the near future. Look for our review of the title around launch as well.

“Epitaph One” has long been rumored to be a game-changing episode for the series, a rumor that was proved true both when the episode screened and when Whedon was asked if the episode could be considered a “second pilot” for the series.

“I wouldn’t call it a second pilot but it is definitely a different vision and it will contain a lot of things about the characters and who they are and where they’re heading that people might not have seen or expected,” Whedon said.

There are a lot of developments expected more specifically for the character of Echo, portrayed by Eliza Dushku. When asked if it was somehow the case that the other dolls and the other characters in the show were somehow “projecting” onto Echo, Joss replied, “Yes, you’re very right to say that they’re projecting on her. A lot of her life, not just because she’s a doll, but also just in general, has to do with the fact that people become obsessive about her. But we are going to learn and starting in this season that they’re not wrong, that there is something truly special about her and that she is going to be a major in factor in what happens to Dollhouse over the next few years.”

Tahmoh Penikett’s Paul Ballard, an FBI agent who was focused on finding the Dollhouse and eventually did, (In fact, at the end of the first season he appeared to be joining the Dollhouse in some capacity) is another character facing some changes for the new season.

“We had always intended for Paul to find the Dollhouse and for his interaction to change because we didn’t want him to be like the reporter in ‘The Hulk,’ showing up too late every episode,” Whedon said of the Ballard character. “And now they’ve been working on him from the outside with November and his alliance with Echo is going to be really tested, because he’s going to be in there with her partially to protect her but also to find out what’s really going on. You know you can gaze into the abyss or you can actually live in it, it’s going to affect you. so we are going to see that while (Echo) is starting to grow, we’re going to see that everybody else really starting to come apart a little bit.”

“Dollhouse” is certainly a kind of abyss — without a doubt, it is the only show on television to so brazenly portray such ethically questionable and morally deep actions and situations. This is not lost on Whedon.

“I think with this show, I want to say to the people who have, you know, felt a connection with me, that maybe you want to back away and avoid eye contact,” he said. “That maybe there’s something horribly wrong with me, and this is my very poetical way of expressing that. I think of it as a work that actually frightens me at times in a way that my shows seldom got to. At the same time I have that sort of jolly love of everything that’s going on and have to be reminded that what I’m doing is reprehensible. So it’s a mature work in the sense that I grew up and went insane.”

On a more serious note, the ethical dilemmas and the role of human nature embedded in the premise of “Dollhouse” are what interest Whedon and are what he will elaborate on more in the upcoming season.

“Well I think ultimately the thing that fascinates me is morality and personal politics; the politics of the personal, of the person in the moment as opposed to the statement,” Whedon said. “Yet I would say in terms of the second season, the abuse of power and the different kinds of forms it can take is going to become broader and more, in fact, political, and we’re going to see the Dollhouse in the world a bit more.”

Perhaps it is that same uncomfortable material that the show deals with that is partly to blame for why “Dollhouse” had a hard time getting renewed.

“I’d say it came extraordinarily close to being canceled,” Joss said. “I’d say it was probably pronounced on the table and we went, “Nooo!” (feigns CPR) and the camera pulled back and it went (gasps) and the music came up and we all cried,” Whedon dramatized. “It came down to some very simple numbers that people worked in a very complicated fashion to fudge laughs and ultimately the fact that my shows have never gone that big, you know they’re marathon runners, they’re not sprinters. This is the studio where I did those shows, even when they weren’t on that network. And they know that, so they fought hard to make it as easy for the network as possible. So it was really the hardcore fan base, the people who are here, to tip the scale. And that scale was tippy.”

Certainly Whedon is no stranger to one of his shows getting axed. The cancellation of “Firefly” infuriates embittered fans (and Whedon, himself) more than half a decade later. With “Dollhouse” so close to the brink, almost from day one, people did wonder if Whedon treated the new show differently than he did “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or “Firefly.”

“I have been hurt before, it’s true. So I made the decision early on just to phone it in. I really feel that that’s better for me,” he joked. “No, you know what — I’m a little bit wiser and a little bit more removed in terms of how I deal emotionally with the whole business of it, but when I get into the story that’s the only world I live in. And I love the characters and I love the cast so much, so that when I get into the writer’s room, and we’re talking about them, that’s our life. And in the same way that’s our only life and all we do is get excited and come up with things that we’re a little embarrassed we thought of.”

Whedon on a “Dollhouse” comic book: “I don’t see it happening. I don’t care how good an artist is, they’re not gonna make an Eliza. Ultimately you know she doesn’t fly, she doesn’t shoot firebolts, except in that one episode — it’s gonna be awesome. So I think this belongs exactly where it is: on television… and in fanfic.”