…from CBC’s now-on-hiatus arts series Zed: A RealVideo clip presenting the hauntingly beautiful song stylings of Northwest Territories throat singer Tanya Tagaq Gillis, with a live electro-ambient backup band.

…MARGARET ATWOOD has written an open letter to America:

“If you proceed much further down the slippery slope, people around the world will stop admiring the good things about you. They’ll decide that your city upon the hill is a slum and your democracy is a sham, and therefore you have no business trying to impose your sullied vision on them. They’ll think you’ve abandoned the rule of law. They’ll think you’ve fouled your own nest.The British used to have a myth about King Arthur. He wasn’t dead, but sleeping in a cave, it was said; in the country’s hour of greatest peril, he would return. You, too, have great spirits of the past you may call upon: men and women of courage, of conscience, of prescience. Summon them now, to stand with you, to inspire you, to defend the best in you. You need them.”

ALAS, our official Best Show On TV, CBC’s Zed, shuts down for the season Tuesday night (11:25 pm) after only 110 weeknight editions. (Still more than Carson showed up for in his last full year.) Starting Wednesday, its time slot will be occupied by hockey payoffs. Now we must wait until fall (or until any yet-unannounced summer reruns) for our fix of weird short films, avant-arts documentary segments, ambient-trance music, and ever-so-elegant host Sharon Lewis (if you’re reading this, Ms. Lewis, please consider becoming my green-card bride so I can live in a sane country).

Or you can go to Zed‘s giant website, where hundreds of films and musical performances from the show are archived. One of my personal favorites on the site is Violet, a complex, existential, and vigorous nine-minute dance short performed by the stunningly accomplished (and elegantly nude) Vancouver dancer Ziyian Kwan. Unfortunately, the site only has an info page (not the film itself) for Babyfilm, a darkly hilarious fake educational film encouraging new parents to become totally paranoid about anything that could possibly be unsafe for the baby. Neither would likely ever appear on PBS, let alone in a high-profile time slot.

CBC just ran a commercial for Zero brand liquid detergent, promising a goth-gal it would keep her clothes their blackest.

…sez we shouldn’t consttantly rail against Bush’s language blunders. For one thing, we can still “criticize the U.S. President based on his bad policies. It ain’t like there’s a shortage of those.” For another, “Language bullying — or prescriptivism, as it’s more
politely called — is conservative in the worst sense. It advances a stuffy
and old-fashioned view of language, the rules of which it considers set by
supposed experts, such as the authors of grammar books, rather than common
usage. It is deeply anti-populist and snobby, not to mention just plain
wrong and cranky.”

…that even Canada doesn’t like the US these days. Kristoff, in this regard, is another ignorant American who hasn’t noticed that Canada hasn’t liked the US for some time now.

…with the hereby-linked commentary by one Dr. David L. Sackett in a Canadian medical journal, containing unkind words about preventative medicine:

“Preventive medicine displays all 3 elements of arrogance. First, it is aggressively assertive, pursuing symptomless individuals and telling them what they must do to remain healthy. Occasionally invoking the force of law (immunizations, seat belts), it prescribes and proscribes for both individual patients and the general citizenry of every age and stage. Second, preventive medicine is presumptuous, confident that the interventions it espouses will, on average, do more good than harm to those who accept and adhere to them. Finally, preventive medicine is overbearing, attacking those who question the value of its recommendations.”

There are also responses to this at the doctors’ weblog Medpundit.

…indeed the best show on TV thus far in this decade.

The CBC’s Zed (named, of course, after the Great White North’s pronounciation of the alphabet’s last letter) is a magazine show of experimental video, animation, and performance art. That capsule description could apply to a dozen or more past shows on PBS and other Stateside channels. But the Vancouver-produced Zed is far different, and far better, than those. Some reasons:

• It’s on its country’s premier network, in a premier time slot: 11:25 p.m.-12:25 a.m. every weeknight, commercial-free. It’s cutting-edge, but it’s not “fringe.”
• It’s carefully curated and sequenced, despite the enormous amount of material it requires. Canada has vast short-film and animation scenes (due partly to arts grants and to the world-renowned National Film Board of Canada), and Zed could consume all its output in a grab-baggy way. Instead, each episode carfully curates a mix of dramatic-narrative shorts, outre comedies, odd cartoons, mini-documentaries, modern-dance clips, spoken-word snippets, avant-garde musical performances, and items too odd to classify.
• Elegant, erudite emcee Sharon Lewis deftly weaves common threads around each night’s selections, without resorting either to support-the-arts hype nor to PBS-style smugness. She knows these are engrossing, captivating films, and she knows she doesn’t have to hard-sell them to you.
• Under the slogan “Open Source Television,” the show solicits viewer contributions. One of my favorites in this category was a tape of a 10-year-old boy trying hard to stay awake to watch the show.
• The show welcomes viewers of all ages, but doesn’t pander or clean things up for them. In keeping with the Film Board’s heritage, the films on Zed can include quite heavy subject matter (abortion, poverty, bereavement, loneliness). The cartoons can range from the gross-out to the incomprehensibly symbolic. Nudity and cuss words are left intact. One clip featured the writhing of a nude male modern dancer; its soundtrack consisted of the dancer discussing the kind of man with whom he’d most want to fall in love.
• The show’s segments have MTV-like credit screens at the beginning and end. These titles include “Web ID” numbers for each short. Anything you see and like (or want to decipher), you can see again online. And if you live where CBC isn’t on cable (i.e., the United States south of Tacoma), you can see and hear the show’s component parts online, though one piece at a time and without Lewis’s introductions.
• But the most important aspects of Zed are its confident attitude and Lewis’s honest rapport with her viewers. The show presumes a universe in which the sorts of ideas and expressions it presents are fully-accepted and respected features of a sophisticated urban society. Zed is neither elitist nor pandering. It fully respects its viewers’ intelligence. It doesn’t divide the populace into “cultured” and “uncultured” castes. It fully expects you to “get” whatever it shows; and if you don’t, or if you don’t like it, something else will be along in less than six minutes.

Zed’s site doesn’t mention how many episodes are in its current first season. CBC series often have short production seasons. But Zed mostly consists of pre-existing (i.e., relatively cheap to acquire) material, so theoretically go on year-round (albeit with rerun weeks here and there).

My advice: If you’re capable of tuning in to it, watch as many Zed episodes as you can now. See what highbrow-arts TV can really become.

The NY Times ran a long and rather dumb article on Wednesday about the Montreal Jazz Festival, one of the largest events of its type on Earth. The feature’s writer loves the festival all right, but questions what the heck the culture of jazz music has to do with La Belle Provence.

I’ll tell you what. Quebec has long thought of itself as the bastion of European civilization in North America. Jazz, or rather certain flavors of classic and modern jazz, have long been commercially centered in Europe, particularly in France. You can hence think of the Montreal fest as a gift of the Francophone world, graciously giving a North American-invented genre back to us.

Also, a major feature of the festival is a nightly downtown street party with high-energy “world music” acts. I just saw one such performance tonight on the Francophone cable channel TV5. A big street party’s the sort of event everybody around the world can dig (they even had ’em at the Salt Lake Olympics). But in a city of hot passions and often cold weather, a summer night’s especially worthy of celebrating. And the Quebecois I saw did just that, splendidly.

…an unexpected tribute to the True North from the once-promising novelist Douglas Coupland. (His comments about the “Canadian character” toward the end are, unremarkably, a lot like what I’ve been saying about the Seattle character.)

…or some other equally exotic foreign land, don’t you dare click on this link to a corporate PR document whose “information is intended for U.S. residents only.”

SPICE-O-LIFE DEPT.: From the Toronto Globe and Mail site, a piece praising Internet porn for the sheer variety of tastes and fetishes to which it can cater.

I KNOW I’M NOT the first to say this, but the Canadian Olympic team roolz!

THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA are finally discovering something I knew all along: “It’s cool to be Canadian!”

It’s only natural this discovery should happen during an Olympic Games, in which media critics (and thousands of other viewers) in norther-tier U.S. regions routinely discover the more thoughtful, less hype-centric CBC coverage.

CBC’s even more vital during a Winter Olympics, what with the Dominion’s traditional strength in hockey, snowboarding, and especially curling (the official World’s Greatest Game). This vitality was only serendipitously enhanced by the emergence of two Canadians as heroes of the current games’ biggest story.

It must be noted, however, that NBC’s coverage this time around is thankfully more CBC-like. That is, it’s more devoted (especially in its daytime blocks on MSNBC and CNBC) to actual sports coverage aimed at people who are, or could conceivably become, interested in the actual sports. Someone there finally noticed that with the network no longer airing baseball, pro football, or (after this season) pro basketball, it’d better start to do right by the one big sports package it still controls.

Over the past three biennia, NBC’s Olympics telethons drew fewer and fewer viewers, especially young-adult TV viewers, even though they’re a celebration of young-adult achievement. By dumbing-down the events and their storylines into ready-for-prime-time pablum, tape-delaying events and then showing only brief snippets of them in between interminable personality-profile segments (usually about workaholic athletes who don’t really have personalities), and by reinterpreting every event as The US vs. Those People, NBC made its telecasts a big joke to anyone who seriously participated in these sports and a squaresville turnoff to other young-adult viewers.

So this time, we get long(er) stretches of live (or, on KING, two-hour-old) events, with canned cutaway segments respectfully educating viewers on the events and their particular inherent dramatic qualities. The personality pieces are fewer, and include at least a modicum of non-US participants. (Of course, it helped the network that it had a real news story at the games to which it could give the OJ/Monica/Jon Benet tabloid treatment.)

I still prefer the CBC approach, though. For one thing, they’ve got much more curling. Also, they spent much less time reiterating every twist-N-turn in the skating-judging affair, even though it starred two Canadians. And its late-night shows are refreshing apres-ski entertainments built around the games’ outdoor concerts (several of which have starred Canadian performers). NBC has the same ol’ grating Leno, who just gets more Attitude-dependent and unlistenable as he approaches his tenth anniversary.

FOLLOW THE WAR-MOBILIZATION of America’s single most vital industry.

ONE MORE REASON I love the CBC: Tonight they ran a documentary about the first year of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, right after a one-hour profile of Olympic women’s hockey players.

TWO OR THREE SHORT THINGS TODAY, starting with a defense of a perennial, and perennially maligned, American institution.

YES, I LIKE NEGATIVE CAMPAIGN ADS. The rest of the time, TV and radio commercials are all bright ‘n’ bouncy, overstuffed with that incessant mandatory happiness that’s pervaded American life from employee-motivation courses to theme-park architecture and even many evangelical churches. But during election season, suddenly the tenor of spots changes.

We get Our Man depicted in bright, cheery color, hugging the wife and kids. The Other Guy, meanwhile, gets portrayed in stern black-and-white still mug shots that get shrunk and darted across the screen; while buzzwords get electronically stamped on his face like canceled postage.

And judging from this year’s slander spots, the received ideas behind the buzzwords are ossifying into a formulaic ritual, of little relation to either the candidates or the voters. Republican consultants still expect the populace to get scared out of our wits by the mere mention of “bureaucrats,” “big government,” and especially “liberal,” as if the Reaganisms of 20 years ago were still a novelty instead of a bore. And the corporate Democrats can’t seem to think of anything to smear Republicans with besides the spectre of an anti-choice Supreme Court.

(There’s plenty of other legit complaints to be made against the Repo Men, of course; but the corporate Demos don’t want to bring up issues on which they could themselves be called to account.)

So if smear ads have become a rite engaged in strictly for its own sake, why haven’t other advertisers hopped on the trend? I’m still hoping to hear something like: “Pepsi says they’ve got the most refreshing soft drink. But take a look at the facts….”

‘SWING’ KIDS: Here’s a recommendation for a book you can’t get, at least not very easily.

Canadian author Billie Livingston was in town a month or two back, accompanying a friend of hers who’d gone to participate in a joint reading at the Elliott Bay Book Co. While here, Livingston consigned a few copies of her new novel Going Down Swinging, thus far published only in Canada.

It’s a gorgeous, poignant little tale about a severely alcoholic mom whose second husband and teenage daughter have both abandoned her. Her only solace, besides bottles and pills and lines, is the seven-year-old second daughter she struggles to keep custody of and who loves her dearly, despite mom’s frequent blackouts and occasional hooking. It’s a tale of real family values and survival, mainly set in Vancouver’s threatened-with-gentrification east end.

You should try to get it, at Elliott Bay or thru a Canadian online bookseller such as Chapters.

UPDATE: Thanks for your emailed comments about our forthcoming experiment with fictional alter-ego characters in the online column. The first episode to include some of them will appear in the next week or two, and will be duly identified as fictional, maybe.

UN-SPOOKED: Halloween 2000 turned out about as expected, at least at the events attended by myself and our intrepid team.

There were the usual assortments of robots, furry critters (rabbits, cats, dogs, et al.), politicians, celebrities (Marilyn Monroe, Jesus, Elvis), lumberjacks, devils, ’70s disco dudes, loinclothed adventure heroes, bare-butted samba belles, firefighters, detectives, politicians, superheroes, and at least one woman dressed as a kitschy lamp (gold body paint, gold grass skirt and bra, a shade on her head).

Not seen, at least by our team were any of the characters that would’ve been really scary here and now:

• A WTO riot cop.

• John Carlson.
• A mummy wrapped in old copies of The Rocket.
• Mariners relief pitcher Arthur Rhodes.

OTHER WORDS (from Aldous Huxley): “I can sympathize with people’s pains but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.”

TOMORROW: The Clash, Motown, and three generations’ notions of musical empowerment.

ELSEWHERE:

• According to Fortune’s dot-com-mania post-mortem piece, “Let’s face it: Nobody wants to buy shampoo over the Internet….”