Underwire Taking the Pulse of Pop Culture

Exclusive: New Time Lord’s Take on Doctor Who




No one knows quite what to expect as Matt Smith steps into David Tennant’s shoes as Doctor Who’s new Time Lord. In the quick clip we’ve seen so far, Smith seems quirkier for sure — and he looks to be an enthusiastic traveler.

So what is Smith’s take on the Doctor’s psyche?

“I think the Doctor’s got a lot of blood on his hands,” says the new star of the long-running British sci-fi show in this exclusive video for Wired.com. Smith also tells why he thinks the good Doctor travels the universe.

The new 13-episode season of Doctor Who, with Stephen Moffat taking over as the show’s lead writer, will be shown on BBC One starting April 3 in Britain. It comes to BBC America on April 17.

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James Cameron Pegs Avatar DVD Release to Earth Day

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HOLLYWOOD — James Cameron is taking Avatar’s eco-friendly message seriously, announcing Tuesday that the sci-fi blockbuster’s DVD release will be pegged to the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day.

“I’m not trying to sell DVDs on the back of the hardship of the planet as much as I’m hoping that continued conversation surrounding Avatar and these issues will elevate consciousness and help us get the things done that need to get done,” said Cameron, pictured above.

Avatar on DVD and Blu-ray hits stores on Earth Day, April 22. <BR/>Image courtesy Fox.

Avatar on DVD and Blu-ray hits stores on Earth Day, April 22.
Image courtesy Fox

During a presentation at a Hollywood Hills mansion, Cameron and producing partner Jon Landau discussed hope that their 3-D epic — which became the highest-grossing movie of all time — would catalyze a fresh wave of eco-activism inspired by the film’s story about an alien planet whose gorgeous natural resources risk ruination by human business interests.

“So many different groups who deal with environmental issues and indigenous rights have been coming to us” since Avatar’s record-breaking release late last year, Cameron said. “They see Avatar as a kind of a focusing lens for all of these issues.”

The standard DVD and Blu-ray releases, which hit stores April 22, will include a code that allows consumers to sign up for the AVATAR program at the official Avatar website. There, fans can adopt one of the million trees that Earth Day Network plans to plant worldwide. Registrants will receive a virtual tag enabling them to locate on a map the spot where their tree is planted.

In November, Fox plans to put out an “Ulitimate” Avatar package including bonus features. But for now, Cameron wants to hype April’s movie-only disc to crank up awareness for Earth Day. “That’s kind of my mission now,” Cameron said.

Photo of James Cameron: Art Streiber/ Wired magazine

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Meet Merton, Chatroulette’s Drive-By Piano Guy

Chatroulette’s instant intimacy makes the daisy-chain webcam service the perfect “venue” for Merton, the improv piano player whose witty real-time songwriting has become a hit on YouTube.

“I’m not really comfortable performing onstage in front of a lot of people, and it’s also much harder to have an intimate experience with a lot of people” when playing live, said the on-the-fly ivory-tickler in an exclusive video interview with Mashable (embedded above). “If you’re in front of a crowd, you can’t so much pick one person and take their experience and make it part of the music.”

Check out the rest of Mashable’s 15-minute interview with Merton, or watch a scrubbed version of his viral video below. (The original video was pulled from YouTube Monday after being viewed millions of times.)

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Archie Bronson Outfit Spins 21st-Century Sci-Fi Grooves on Coconut

Archie Bronson Outfit

Coconut, the title of Archie Bronson Outfit’s latest dizzying blend of grooves, sounds organic enough. But from its vintage synths and sine oscillators to its spacey, sci-fi sound, the record is an inorganic pleasure.

In an era up to its space helmet in retrospective gold rushes, it’s practically impossible to listen to Coconut and think it could have been made any time other than the 21st century.

LISTEN: “Bite It and Believe It” by Archie Bronson Outfit

“This was precisely our goal,” Archie Bronson Outfit bassist and guitarist Dorian Hobday told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. “It’s a challenge to use all those sounds and not end up with something crap and/or retro.”

Not that the British trio’s music doesn’t recall 20th-century standouts like Wire, Gang of Four, New Order or even an ambitious Cream. But one listen to “Shark’s Tooth” (or one look at the song’s video, below) and it’s clear that the Archie Bronson Outfit’s latest effort mines our new-millennial overload for all it’s worth, rather than relying on any particular revivalist opportunity. Gliding in and out of the orbit of drone, garage, dance and psychedelia, hardly any of the songs on Coconut, out Tuesday from Domino Recording, sound alike.

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Vials of Artist’s Blood, Skin Show Up in Freaky Art Show Flesh and Blood

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Even the most jaded art connoisseurs have to marvel at John U. Abrahamson’s weird sense of mission: The artist spent a year extracting skin samples and blood from his own body, then stored the material in 650 vials for an installation that includes 20 oil paintings of distorted body parts.

In Flesh and Blood, the vials, grouped together in the shape of a prone human, hover from a steel cage. Inside, Los Angeles gallery-goers are invited to tear pages from 30 journals chronicling 15 years of Abrahamson’s artistic activity.

Abrahamson describes the installation, which includes the Puddle oil painting (pictured above), as “catharsis.” On his blog, the San Francisco-based artist details his grisly preparations for the show: “Working on harvesting flesh in larger amounts. I have had to get more creative with the flesh harvesting since I have exhausted most of my easy takes. Now on to more vulnerable areas. Have to wear long sleeve shirts and long pants, which is not a problem since it is still cool weather. Makes you very aware of your outer shell when almost all of it catches on cloths. Like having Velcro for skin or having rope burns over 3/4 of your body. Showers are a lot of fun right now.”

Flesh and Blood runs through April 24 at Bert Green Fine Art.

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New Doctor Who Emerges From the Tardis




After a glorious run with David Tennant as the Doctor and Russell T. Davies as the show’s writer, a new Doctor Who is emerging from the Tardis. Matt Smith is the 11th incarnation of the Time Lord in the show, the longest-running sci-fi television series in history.

In the one-minute video clip above, we get a quick flash of Smith as the new Doctor — and he appears to be quite different from his predecessor. Whereas Tennant’s Doctor was handsome and sometimes brooding (think Hamlet), Smith brings the enthusiasm of a newborn to the role, and wants to share his wonder with a new companion, a girl named Amy Pond (played by Karen Gillan).

In the upcoming season’s 13 episodes, the Doctor and Ms. Pond will travel through the space-time continuum to locations including 16th-century Venice, Victorian-era France and a futuristic floating nation in space known as — the U.K.

The new season of Doctor Who, with BAFTA- and Hugo-winning scribe Stephen Moffat taking over as the show’s lead writer, will be shown on BBC One starting April 3 in Britain. It comes to BBC America on April 17.

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Gamer Comedy The Guild Makes Streamy Top 10

Gamers voted with their mouses to vault The Guild and several other videogame-oriented web series to the top of the 10 most popular of the year as curated by the Streamy Awards.

Crowdsourcing the finalists for its Audience Choice Award, the Streamy organization announced Monday that actress-writer Felicia Day and her crew will compete for the populist honor. Besides The Guild, other gamer-oriented finalists include mock Zelda epic Legend of Neil and French show Noob.

Also competing are former Married With Children star David Faustino’s Star-ving, the quirky Agents of Cracked, college romp Dorm Life, teen drama Anyone But Me, YouTube sensation Elevator, Revision3’s geek news series The Totally Rad Show and liberal talk show The Young Turks.

Partisans can vote for their favorite show once a day at the Streamy Awards site through April 11, when the 2nd annual awards ceremony will be streamed live from Los Angeles by the International Academy of Web Television. Did Streamy voters get it right or did your favorite get left off the list? Weigh in below.

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Michael Jackson’s Revived Captain EO Is Still Wired, Slightly Tired

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ANAHEIM, California — Michael Jackson’s 3-D short film Captain EO is playing again at Disneyland, and the 24-year-old space opera still holds up. Mostly.

Representing the height of 1986 movie technology, Captain EO was a lavish collaboration between Disney and George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic studio. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Jackson at the zenith of his career, the 17-minute film was shown only in custom-built theaters in Disney parks from 1986 to 1994. Following Jackson’s death in 2009, fans clamored for Captain EO’s return, and Disney brought it back, though only to Disneyland, on Feb. 23.

Captain EO stars Michael Jackson in the title role, commander of a starship full of rejects who’d get eaten alive if they sauntered into the Mos Eisley cantina. The bumbling team is tasked with delivering a message to the Supreme Leader of an evil planet (played by Anjelica Huston), and that message is of course a lavish song-and-dance number.

In the mid-’80s, the film stunned audiences with a combination of cutting-edge visuals and in-theater special effects. Can it recapture the magic nearly a quarter-century later? To find out, we went to Disneyland and took in Captain EO — twice. Here’s what still works today, and what’s aged noticeably.

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SXSW Is a Band’s Social Network Like No Other

Small Black, from left to right, is Juan Pieczanski on bass, Jeff Curtin on drums, Josh Kolenik on vocals and electronics, and Ryan Heyner on keyboards. Photo: Keith Axline/Wired.com

Small Black, from left to right, is Juan Pieczanski on bass, Jeff Curtin on drums, Josh Kolenik on vocals and electronics and Ryan Heyner on keyboards.
Photo: Keith Axline/Wired.com

AUSTIN, Texas — Don’t expect the bands and labels gathered at the South by Southwest Music Festival to forsake MySpace, Twitter and Facebook anytime soon.

Most musicians and industry players find that none of these virtual connections replace the need to shake hands, look one another in the eye or bond over a couple of Lone Star beers — all the ways people traditionally networked socially before the internet enabled what we now call “social networking.”

CES 2010“It started on the airplane [to Austin],” said Diplo, aka Wes Pentz, of Major Lazer, a dance-oriented duo that’s known worldwide, unlike most of the groups that play the annual Texas music festival.

“I was sitting next to 303’s label lady, and she said, ‘You guys should do more mixes for us.’ Then it went on in the car, with my sister’s friend who runs a record label, talking about going to their show and checking out their band…. I’m not that interested in meeting label bosses and [potential] remix bands. That’s what managers do. I’m only here to hang out with people that I love, and see what DJs are playing and what records are getting people to go crazy.”

As the music industry struggles to figure out a business model that works in the digital era, musicians increasingly find it’s more important to connect with their peers at SXSW than it is to try to land a record deal or find management. Lining up a tour, or connecting with players from a powerful regional music scene, can lay the foundation for building a successful fan base.

For many attendees, the massive festival gives them a chance to meet their online friends for the first time, turning SXSW into something like a series of blind dates for bands.

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SXSW: Comic Artist James Kochalka Heads to Mars and Beyond

James Kochalka

James Kochalka performs an impromptu show in an Austin bar during South by Southwest.

AUSTIN, Texas — James Kochalka is a bit of a nerd wizard.

He’s a renowned comic book artist with a daily strip and several graphic novels to his name, and he’s almost finished designing his first videogame. He’s also a songwriter and musician who fronts his own rock band, called James Kochalka Superstar.

Now, the Vermont native can add another gold star to his resume: science fiction film actor.

Kochalka plays a supporting role in the new film Mars, an animated feature centering on a love story between two astronauts aboard the first manned mission to the red planet. Kochalka saw Mars for the first time here at the South by Southwest Film Conference and Festival, where it had its world premiere last week.

The entire film, which was written and directed by Geoff Marslett, was shot in front of a green screen. The backgrounds, the space-travel sequences and all the effects were added in post-production. Since everything going on behind them is animated, the actors were rotoscoped using computers. The finished product has a look that’s realistic, but still stylized and dreamlike.

Kochalka is used to looking at drawings of himself — his autobiographical American Elf comic strip features a pointy-eared version of him as the main character. But seeing Marslett’s artistic interpretation of him was a little jarring.

“I loved the movie, but watching myself was really painful,” he says. “It was this weird feeling of, ‘That’s me, but that’s not me’”

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