Archie may be 68 years old but his creators see nothing but potential in him among today's teens, reports George Gene Gustines in the New York Times (8/15/10). "I think there's been periods when you can tell that Archie comics had been written by men in their 50s," says Mark Evanier, a comic book historian. That period ended last year, when a new administration took over and began introducing storylines hinting at bigamy and characters who are out of the closet. This created buzz, and the buzz created sales.

At its peak, in the 1940s, a single Archie comicbook would sell more than a million copies. At its nadir, the 2000s, it "averaged around 2,455 copies." But the bigamy storyline (in which Archie imagines being married to both Veronica and Betty) sold 60,000, and now the comic averages about 5,000 copies per issue. Part of the success is owed to a different format -- a larger, "magazine-size publication that is part comic book, part 'Teen Beat.'" The approach played well with retailers, including CVS, Walmart, Target, Toys R Us and Barnes & Noble.

"I hate to denigrate comic book stores," says Michael Uslan, also a comic book historian. "They are wonderful, but for a kid to buy an Archie comic or for a parent to buy an Archie comic for a kid, they are not going to go to a walk-up in a bad part of town." The Archie empire is currently run by Jon Goldwater and Nancy Silberkleit, whose father and father-in-law, respectively, founded Archie comics. They envision everything from Archie apps to apparel to Broadway musicals to using Archie to promote literacy. "We're at the beginning of the beginning," says Jon. "Publishing will always be part of it, but we must morph into a multimedia company."

If there were any doubt that burlesque is making a comeback in New York City, its presence at the Plaza Hotel likely ends it, suggests Pia Catton in the Wall Street Journal (8/2/10). No less a venue than the Plaza's Oak Room is the unlikely setting for The Sophisticates, described by its host, Abe Goldfarb, as "a pretty classic burlesque revue." The dancers keep things relatively clean, and perform "amidst the club's tables, making eye contact or ... tossing gloves to the seated patrons."

According to Abe, this is the way burlesque used to be done. "It gives the opportunity for a floor show," he says. "In the old films that deal with burlesque, the performers are on the floor level. It was more flirtatious." The Sophisticates is a "two-act show" that originally was supposed to be monthly, but because of popular demand, it's now bi-weekly. Other venues include the Slipper Room, which is currently closed for renovation, and Coney Island USA.

James Habacker of the Slipper Room says burlesque has its roots in serious matters that attract serious people. "It's political satire first and foremost," says James, whose act involves "a top-hat-and-cane vaudeville character with hilarious timing." He adds: "It's people who are more interested in art than landing a role in a TV show... I'm old enough to remember when there was some really amazing experimental theater going on. The burlesque scene has a foothold in that."

Penny Starr Jr. is combining her love for sci-fi with her genetic predisposition for burlesque to create her own brand of performance art, reports David Moye on AOL News (7/30/10). Penny grew up watching sci-fi films with her parents, and her grandmother, Penny Starr Sr., who was a burlesque star in the '50s and '60s. For a while, Penny Jr. was into "feminist performance" art but she got the idea to follow in her grandma's dancesteps after making "a documentary on the Velvet Hammer, a modern-day burlesque troupe."

"I think of myself as a nerd first," says Penny,"then a filmmaker; and finally, a dancer. All of these things fuel each other." She observes that burlesque archetypes aren't all that different from, say, Princess Leia (video). "After all," she says. "Star Trek and Star Wars are just modern-day equivalents of the myths of the Norse Gods." Penny likes to think of what she's doing as a sophisticated art form, but admits that her audience might not.

"The audience doesn't care about the art," she says. "They just want to see their favorite sci-fi pin-ups take their clothes off." Nor does she see it as a big moneymaker, necessarily, but she does see it as a way to remind people "of what burlesque originally was," before the comics and the dancers parted ways. "No one's making enough money here that we have to appeal to the lowest common denominator," says Penny, adding: "That said, Star Trek is pretty popular." In addition to live performances, Penny is also about to release a DVD, "Supernova A Go-Go Sci-Fi Burlesque Show."

In North Dakota, which has the highest rate of binge drinking in the country, one antidote is small-town movie houses, like the Roxy in Langdon, reports Patricia Leigh Brown in the New York Times (7/5/10). Langdon's population is just 2,000, but 200 of its residents volunteer to keep the movies running. Steve Hart, a farmer, was among those who helped revive the Roxy, says just about nothing keeps people from finding community at the theater.

When a blizzard hit on Christmas several years ago, Steve says his phone started ringing. Within an hour, he says, "there were 90 people on Main Street, even though there was only one path through the drifts and the movie was 'Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel'." Clearly, folks were there for something other than the movie. "It's the see-and-be-seen, bring everyone and sit together kind of place," says Cecile Wehrman, who helped revive another North Dakota theater, in Crosby.

Tim Kennedy, who is writing a book about small-town movie houses like the Roxy, says the theaters are "buildings as social capital" that flourish "outside the franchise cinemas and their ubiquitous presence at the malls." Tom Isern of North Dakota State University Fargo, says the theaters signal a "bounce back from the bottom" in the state, and credits baby boomers with the trend. "They are the last picture show generation on the plains ... who can remember that movie theater experience and want to transmit it to their kids."

"We sell the mentality of Switzerland," said the late Nicolas Hayek, founder of the Swatch Group Ltd., as reported by Margalit Fox in a New York Times obituary (6/29/10). What Nicolas sold was a lot of Swiss watches at a time when they were otherwise in decline -- and perhaps headed for extinction. In fact, Nicolas had been retained by a group of Swiss banks to draw up a plan to liquidate Switzerland's watchmaking industry. But Nicolas ended up buying two of its biggest companies instead, and reinventing the business.

This was the early 1980s and the problem was that Seiko and other Japanese watchmakers were making cheap, digital watches, and the public was snapping them up. Nicolas's solution was the Swatch, which were "lightweight, with vibrantly colored bands and breezy novelty faces." With just "51 parts, as opposed to the nearly 100 needed to make a traditional wristwatch," the Swatch initially "retailed for less than $35" in the United States.

The nifty part was that the watches became collectibles: "It was very likely the first time that ordinary people had even considered owning multiple watches." Nicolas himself sometimes wore as many as four watches on each arm -- cheap and luxury models (which his company also made) alike. The best part was that Swatch sales drove sales of more expensive watches, too: "By redirecting consumers' attention to Swiss watchmaking as a whole, the little plastic watch lifted all boats." Nicolas Hayek was 82, and died the day before yesterday, with his watches on, at the Swatch Group headquarters in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland.

Alfred Hitchcock thought Pyscho was a dud until he heard Bernard Herrmann's score for it, reports Jack Sullivan in the Wall Street Journal (6/16/10). Hitchock's direction had been to use little or no music in the film, a device that had worked well in previous films, like Blackmail. But it wasn't working for Psycho and so Herrmann decided to take matters into his own hands, and in direct defiance of Hitchock's orders, added shrieking strings to the infamous shower scene (video) where Hitch had specified silence.

Hitchock loved it, "suddenly became enthusiastic about Psycho and gradually assented to other cues as well, including the anxious violas during the camera's inspection of Marion's stolen money on the bed and the creepy Peeping Tom theme in the Bates Motel ... It wasn't just the shower cue that astonished, but everything, beginning with the sultry chords in the opening scene that erupt when the lovers rise from the hotel bed and begin talking."

The score invested "the most banal images -- a suitcase on a bed, a car on an empty highway -- with dread." Hitchcock himself "said that the music raised Psycho's impact by 33 percent." The film was the sixth Hitchcock-Hermann collaboration but Hitchcock later came to feel "that his style was too dependent on Herrmann's music, and that may have wounded his pride," suggests John Williams, another Hitchcock composer. Hitchcock eventually fired Herrmann for misbehaving again by writing music where Hitch had demanded silence for the big murder scene in Torn Curtain in 1966.

"Abnormality can become a feature," says Jonathan Berger, commenting on a growing consumer preference for low-fidelity music, reports Joseph Plambeck in the New York Times (5/10/10). Jonathan, a music professor at Stanford, is commenting on "an informal study among his students that found that, over the roughly seven years of the study, an increasing number of them preferred the sound of files with less data over the high-fidelity recordings."

Ironically, amid "an explosion in dazzling technological advances ... in surround sound, high definition and 3-D ... the quality of what people hear -- how well the playback reflects the original sound has taken a step back. To many expert ears, compressed music files produce crackly, tinnier and thinner sound than music on CDs and certainly on vinyl. And to compete with other songs, tracks are engineered to be much louder as well."

This has everything to do with the rise of iTunes and the demand for quick downloads and jam-packed MP3 players. "It would have been very difficult for the iTunes store to launch with high-quality files if it took an hour to download a single song," notes David Dorn of Rhino Records. However, Apple last year "upgraded the standard quality for a song to 256 kilobits per second from 128 killobits ... preserving more details." And a few services, such as HDtracks, are now offering higher-fidelity downloads, but so far mostly only for "classical or jazz music."

Some filmmakers are "using Sundance not just as a sales tool but also as a platform for immediate digital delivery," reports Brooks Barnes in the New York Times (1/25/10). Their reasoning is largely based on hard numbers. Of the $3.7 billion worth of films submitted to Sundance Festival this year, "only about $120 million worth make the schedule, and of those less than $30 million worth will find their way to market through the traditional system." So, for a film like "One Too Many Mornings" (trailer), which cost about $50,000 to make, it's a no-brainer to try something non-traditional.

Michael Mohan, the film's writer and director, is making it available for download for $10 and is selling DVDs for $20. "For $35, customers get a DVD, a poster and a piece of the sofa featured in the film." Michael is also offering theatrical rights via his website for $100,000. "Forget a bidding war," he says. "Whoever gets to their laptop the fastest gets it." Michael doesn't see any downside to his approach. "There's no reason it can't go to theaters after it's available online; it's two different groups of people," he says.

But this probably wouldn't work for a more expensive film. "If you've made a movie for $5 million and you're only doing a video-on-demand deal, your investors are getting killed," says Jay Cohen, an agent. Indeed, the average Sundance candidate cost about $1 million to make. But some think a hybrid distribution strategy like Michael's might have a future. "It probably does send Hollywood some signals," says Joshua Sapan, ceo of Rainbow Media, a Cablevision subsidiary that, among other things, owns the Sundance Channel. However, he cautions that specialty films generally don't "have broad commerciality as a goal."

"The Doors were a blues-based band with literary aspirations," says Ray Manzarek in a Wall Street Journal article by Jim Fusilli (12/2/10). This may or may not come as a surprise to those who remember the Doors for AM hit singles like "Light My Fire," "Hello, I Love You" and "Touch Me," or even FM hits like "Riders on the Storm" and "L.A. Woman." But, in the early days, as Ray, the band's keyboardist, recalls, the Doors had to fill their shows with something and so they filled it with the blues.

"We had to do four sets a night, maybe five on the weekend," says Ray. "That's a lot of time to kill. So we started to play the blues." Both he and the rest of the band "admired Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and John Lee Hooker as well as groups like ... Paul Butterfield Blues Band with guitarist Mike Bloomfield." But their blues roots were soon upended, recording just one blues standard, Back Door Man on their first album, but no others on the next three.

"We had our own material," explains Ray. And when the Doors played live, they just played the hits. But on their fifth album, Morrison Hotel, the Doors began to return to their roots, with some original blues compositions. A subsequent album, "Live in New York" recorded over four shows at Madison Square Garden's Felt Forum, featured plenty of blues. They even punched up their hits with a more bluesy edge. Alas, just as the band was getting back to its roots, Jim Morrison died. Fortunately, a new, six-disc box set (link), captures the band's final live performances, suggesting what might have been.

When the Tower Records on Sunset Strip closed, Nic Adler feared that the Roxy Theater might be next, reports Tricia Romano in the New York Times (12/6/09). It had been 36 years since Nic's father, Lou, opened the Roxy in partnership with none other than David Geffen. So hot was the Roxy that they really had no competition. But the days when John Lennon was a regular and Guns N' Roses made its name there were long gone.

Lou blames Seattle grunge for ending his party: "It became uncool to wear latex," he says. "And instantly, we had lost a whole scene, just like that." The "scene" has since moved about six miles east of the Strip, to "the hipper Silver Lake and Echo Park" areas. Nic understood the magnitude of the challenge: "We had built such a perception on the Sunset Strip that we were so passé ... It wasn't going to be like, we're Twittering, so now we're cool."

Nic's first move was simply booking hipper, indie acts like D.J. Steve Aoki and Them Crooked Vultures. He softened the club's attitude, allowing customer to take pictures during performances, for instance. And, yes, he started using Twitter, @theroxy, both to announce shows as well as monitor customer complaints, "leaving free drinks for people under their Twitter handles." He even attends city council meetings and joined the local business association. "I was handed a legend," says Nic, "and I am expected to continue that legacy."