DEAD AIR RE-REVISITED: Here at Misc. World HQ we already miss the “Today’s Rock” sounds of KGRG, a mere two weeks after the Green River Community College station became unavailable to Seattle listeners. For the past three years or so, the Auburn-based KGRG had been rebroadcast at least part-time on the stronger signal of KBTC, out of Tacoma’s Bates Technical College. The combination station played western Washington’s strongest and purest dose of pomo, indie and A-word noise music, as delivered by a team of undisciplined and unjaded young DJs.
They’re still at it, but you can only hear them if you’re in range of KGRG’s own 100-watt transmitter. KBTC’s now airing its own stuff full-time, a forgettable “classic rock” format with nothing you can’t get on commercial oldies stations. KGRG’s management is looking into signal improvements and other ways to reconnect with its Seattle and Tacoma fans, but isn’t promising anything right now. Of course, if the Bates people were smart, they’d bring in volunteers from KGRG and other stations who could help turn KBTC into a station people would want to listen to. But they’re not, at least not yet.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Wurms -N- Dirt candy simulates the fishin’ hole bait bucket of your youth (at least of the youth the nostalgia industry expects you to have had). The clear plastic bucket contains gummy worms in a black powder of crushed chocolate cookies. It’s made by the same Texas company that packages bubble gum in CD jewel boxes, and is available at the new Candy Barrel national-chain outlet in Pioneer Square…. Those oh-so-clever candy and gum novelties from Wrigley’s Amurol division are now all at one handy display in selected stores, including the Plaid Pantry on 50th and Roosevelt. One-stop shopping for candy beepers, bandages, signet rings, and fake chewing tobacco–now that’s what I call convenience.
ILL-DEFINED: Saw the hi-definition TV fest at the UA Cinemas, put on by KCTS and the Japanese Film Festival. HDTV has been on the air in Japan for a few years now. KCTS, which has ties to Japanese broadcasting thanks to its Asia Now news magazine show, has one of the few HDTV production setups in the US. It uses the equipment to make those Over America travelogue videos.
The Japanese incarnation of HDTV works a lot like regular TV, but with a wide screen and over twice the image lines. For this demonstration, pictures were shown simultaneously on a projection TV system on the theater screen and on a consumer-model HDTV receiver in the lobby. The image in the theater looked enough like film that you had to squint at the subtitles to tell it was video. And the picture-tube image in the lobby was better than any movie film except IMAX; brighter and sharper than anything you’ve ever seen.
Program content left a lot to be desired: Besides the aforementioned helicopter travelogue landscapes, there were a couple of silly-pretentious surrealistic drama shorts made by Japanese networks and a demo video made by TCI Cable. In the latter, a noble native American shaman tells his cute grandson that modern communications technology will make all the world’s peoples into one family, so maybe they’ll stop fighting one another. (These two must belong to a less-dysfunctional family than any I’ve known.) The best two pieces were the ones that didn’t try to show off the technology: A Yussou N’Adour number from Woodstock ’94 and a documentary about legendary film composer Toru Takemitsu.
So when’s HDTV coming to American consumers? Never, for the system shown at the UA. Japanese HDTV technology has already been superseded, at least on the drawing board, by several proposed American systems that would use compressed digital transmission. The TV-set industry and the FCC are supposed to decide the final specs for digital HDTV within the year. The first sets will be expensive, aimed mostly at laserdisc collectors and at scientific-technical applications. Satellite, cable, and/or UHF HDTV broadcasts could start by the turn of the millennium.
