These were the gigs of our lives

The News Review:

- These were the gigs of our lives
- Gap Is in Need of a Niche
- Crooked X factor: Local band advances in national morning show…

These were the gigs of our lives
Times nline – Jan 27, 2007
I was ripe for it; overdue really. I had turned 15 the month before the concert and though people thought I looked older than I was I was remarkably naive and unworldly at that age. Despite a few character-building events in my childhood — the death of my mother when I was almost 8 the experience of being a minority in DC public schools — I was so unsophisticated so unaware of the world that I didn’t even realise Queen was an English band until the lead singer Freddie Mercury appeared in a tight white catsuit on stage at the Capital Centre raised a glass of champagne at 18000 screaming fans and toasted us with “Good evening Washington” in a fruity English accent. Then I started screaming. I had been a Queen fan for a couple of years by then. A Night at the pera was the first LP I bought and I could sing every word of every song… Freddie’s toast worked its magic though giving me the connection I needed to negotiate a place within the strangeness of the concertgoing experience itself: the weird scary power of a crowd; the mixture of exhilaration and embarrassment at collective participation; the physical discomfort of standing for two hours when there’s a perfectly comfortable seat behind you. It is one of those tricky unresolved tensions at concerts: are we there to listen to the music or actively respond to it participate as a group or answer our needs as individuals? It’s an issue I’ve never entirely resolved — from Queen onwards I have spent concerts going in and out of myself losing myself to the music and spectacle one minute the next minute overly conscious of myself clapping or singing or screaming and wondering why concerts have to be such an uncomfortable physical ordeal. I was taken aback by the sound of Queen’s music live: not just the volume but the familiarity and also the strange rawness of the songs. Studio albums have all the mistakes airbrushed out the layers added in the balance between players carefully calibrated like clever dialogue in a play without the awkward pauses and unfinished conversations you get in real life. Queen albums were highly produced multi-layered affairs. Live the music was necessarily stripped of a lot of the choral mixing more raucous simpler and much messier. The band wisely didn’t dare attempt to reproduce in its entirety the long baroque confection that is Bohemian Rhapsody.

Gap Is in Need of a Niche
New York Times – Jan 27, 2007
It featured the pair dancing in customized Gap jeans his with metal studs down the seam; hers with a waist-to-cuff velvet ribbon. It was just the kind of envelope-pushing fashion Gap needed to compete with popular new designer-inspired denim brands like Diesel Rock & Republic and Seven for All Mankind. But there was a catch: the bedazzled jeans which Gap called a “celebration of personal style” could not be found at its stores. Consumers had to buy a pair of basic unembellished jeans at the store and customize them at a special training sessions held at some Gaps or take a trip to… How do they wear it as the ads asked? Increasingly they just do not. In an era of niches when exclusion is as vital as inclusion Gap has become an anachronism: a single chain selling only its own brand with one point of view chasing shoppers from birth to death. “If you stand for everything in fashion today you stand for nothing” said Paul R. Charron the former chief executive of Liz Claiborne who is credited with revitalizing the clothing company by purchasing fast-growing brands like Juicy Couture and Lucky Brand. “Brands like the Gap brands broadly available” Mr. Charron said “have a special challenge to be relevant in a period when focus and exclusivity are so important.

Crooked X factor: Local band advances in national morning show…
Free with registration – Tulsa World – AccessMyLibrary.com – Jan 27, 2007
(27-JAN-07) Tulsa World (Tulsa K). 27–Teenage metal prodigies Crooked X advanced to the semi-finals in the CBS Early Show’s "Living Room Live!. " The band won with a video clip of its four-minute p.