BYTE ME: The infamous Tacoma internet tax was repealed last week. The city wanted to collect 6 percent of all revenue from online activities sold to Tacoma residents, no matter where in the world the service providers are. Dozens of angry on-liners packed a city council meeting on the tax, only to be told that mayor Brian Ebersole and a majority of the city council had already agreed to dump the scheme at the earliest opportunity.
CATHODE CORNER: Spud Goodman’s exile in out-of-state cable hell is over. KCPQ has agreed to air the episodes Goodman now makes for an obscure cable channel nobody here can get. They’ll run ultra-late-night Monday nights/ Tuesday mornings this fall. Most of the fictional relatives and fake talk-guests seen on Goodman’s old KTZZ show will reappear in the new show, at least occasionally. The new show’s shot in a makeshift studio in a Tacoma garage with a tiny crew, resulting in something even less slick than Spud’s old show.
TUBE TOP: A little over a year ago, I told you about the big-screen capabilities of hi-definition TV. Now, I’ve seen that invention’s inverse: Virtual i-Glasses, from Seattle’s own Virtual I-O company. It’s a headset that looks sort of like the virtual-reality glasses, but instead has two LCD-based miniature TV screens (one for each eye) and stereo sound. Blockbuster Video will rent you one for $9.95, compatible with most VCRs and video-game systems. Versions for personal computers are now being rolled out. The device is still delicate, particularly under heavy-use situations (I had to return the first unit I rented from Blockbuster; its audio didn’t work and its video only worked intermittently). But when it’s working, it turns TV into something more akin to the theater experience. Instead of the picture and sound fighting for attention with assorted room distractions, you’re hearing and seeing everything up close and at attention. While the LCD screens lack sufficient brightness variations (making black-and-white images look washed out), in most other respects the picture’s as good as anything on a full-size TV. You can read NBC closing credits and can even sometimes see baseballs being pitched. Between this and the CD-sized Digital Video Disc players due later this year or early next, video will be a truly portable medium. Imagine: No more settling for the CNN Airport Network or the Hollywood dregs that become in-flight movies. I can imagine ravegoers using them to escape into a trance-like state (Virtual I-O’s people tell me its most popular use is at dentists’ offices, for just that same purpose).
GAZING & GRAZING: Local artists Josh Greene and Paul Sundberg have this outdoor installation, Living Room, at the ex-nightclub lot at 5th & Lenora. A fully-furnished room (with two walls), its intended (according to the artists’ statement) to examine “homelessness, socio-economic class distinctions, as well as various other facets of urban life.” A similar but more elaborate installation’s now showing in Copenhagen, where conceptual artists Henrik Lehmann and Malene Botoft are about to finish a three-week stint living inside a fully-furnished home set up in a plexiglass cage at the city zoo. Every part of the artists’ 320-square-foot temporary home (except the bathroom) is fully visible to the public during the zoo’s open hours. An AP dispatch says there’s a zoo-standard plaque outside the homo sapiens cage “describing their main characteristics, life expectation, average number of young, and distribution on earth.” It quotes Lehmann as having devised the installation “to make visitors think about their
ties to nature.”
SAY WHAT??: “Personally, I’m sick and tired of old-world media, and I’m also a little bit tired of old-world values… This is an opportunity not only to do something new, but also an opportunity not to surrender to the powers that be. And in creating this new commercial place and this new commercial paradigm, our generation has the opportunity to maintain control over something we’re implementing.”–Hikaru Phillips, telling the mag Go Digital about his online gambling enterprise, Virtual Vegas.
(Misc. still seeks any half-good Jack/ Shawn Kemp jokes. Leave them at clark@speakeasy.org.
