Now the Great Gazoo will never get back to his home planet.

…the first person to notice the similarities between the logo for this year’s Seattle International Film Festival and that of Mattel. You can tell it’s an Argentinian abstract-collage feature, it’s swell!

Remember, an angel has no memory.

…to mass culture? You know, those shows everybody saw, those records everybody heard, those books everybody claimed to have read? Gone the way of boutique-size bookstores, three-channel TV, and single-screen cinemas.

The Utah guy who wanted to sell “sanitized” (i.e., censored) versions of Hollywood DVDs has been arrested and accused of having sex with underage girls.

…black characters in movies who don’t just exist to magically improve the lives of white heroes.

And these are among the stories you might discuss at work, on the bus, or in chatrooms:

• A “person of interest” is in custody in the New Year’s Eve stabbing on Capitol Hill.
• A stage musical based on the Shrek movies premieres in Seattle this fall. As you all remember, the plot of the first Shrek film involved an egomaniacal feudal lord who wanted to banish from his realm anything funky, funny, strange, or otherwise less than upscale. Seattle will be a perfect place to retell this. Speaking of which…
• Will any arts groups be left at the Capitol Hill Odd Fellows hall after the new landlord’s done raising the rents?
• Bush decreed the Navy doesn’t have to follow environmental regulations; allowing sonar transmissions no matter what they do to whales. Remember: The military is here to protect.
• The SeaTimes points with pride to a volunteer patrol that’s helping drive the hookers away from Aurora Avenue. Of course, without the hookers, all Aurora has to offer is the Beth’s Cafe 12-egg omelet.
• Reversing past trends, the developers of a partially-built condo project in Lower Queen Anne will instead convert the building to rentals.
• The Seattle Monorail Project will soon settle its affairs and shut down; while vague plans for an Eastside commuter rail line begin to take shape.
• The revised date on a city hearing to discuss preserving the endangered Manning’s/Denny’s building in Ballard: Feb. 20.
• State Sen. Eric Oemig, D-Kirkland, would like the Legislature to go on record supporting Bush’s impeachment.
• Not so painless: The anesthesiology staff at Northwest Hospital asked for a pay raise. Instead, the hospital’s CEO fired them all.

…I hope, this evening (Friday), 6:30-8:30 p.m., for the fantabulous next book event starring yr. loyal web-author. It’s at Not A Number, an artistic and subversive gift and card shop on N. 45th in wondrous Wallingford.

IN OTHER, LESSER FRIDAY NOOZE:

• A shop after my own head, Bernie Utz Hats (sometimes inexplicably spelled “Byrnie” Utz), may or may not move next year. Seattle’s last downtown specialty hat store has been at Third and Union for 68 years.
• The next big thing, NW music-wise: That’s the current hype for Kimya Dawson, she of the K Records singer-songwriter stable, now featured on the Juno soundtrack.
• The bus tunnel is still shut.
• The Port of Seattle just got some worse news, in the form of a state audit questioning its spending and construction-project oversight.
• In the “DUH!” department, experts report that more commuters means worse traffic jams, drunk driving is a bad thing, the Bushies are stonewalling tougher fuel-economy standards, and the Okies want a pro basketball team.
• Willie Nelson’s giving $40,000 to charities in Vancouver USA, where he worked as an itinerant DJ back in the 1950s.
• Dumb criminal of the week: A guy who not only allegedly has sex with minors, but videotapes it, sometimes on public property.
• Feds are investigating whether Washington Mutual Bank deliberately used inflated property appraisals in selling mortgages.
• No Crocodile news, except for a benefit show for ex-employees on Sunday the 30th.
• The Neah Bay/Makah region along the Washington coast doesn’t just have rogue whalers. It’s also got ocean waves, which some believe can be used to make electricity.

…and occasional rock star Sean Nelson’s got a handy guide to the worst movie endings ever.

How does the Hollywood establishment adapt the Great Atheistic Children’s Novel? By scrubbing all the anti-religious stuff out, naturally. (Link may require paid registration.)

I haven’t mentioned it much here, but I’ve been admiring the online scribblings of HorsesAss.org’s David “Goldy” Goldstein. Most recently, he’s lucidly compared the totally-made-up faux-controversy over a newspaper advertisement with the classic play/movie Betrayal.

On one level, David Lynch’s brief memoir/manifesto Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity is, like most of Lynch’s body of work, bewildering.

On another level, like most of Lynch’s body of work, it makes perfect sense by its own individualistic sense of logic.

The bewildering part is when Lynch frequently segues into endorsement spots for Transcendental Meditation. He’s practiced it for almost as long as he’s practiced filmmaking, and now has his own “David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace.”

I’m sure Lynch has sincerely benefitted from his TM practice. It’s a minor shame he takes the movement’s PR lines at face value. For some reason I’d expected more healthy skepticism from him. But instead he waxes enthusiastic about the “unified field” and a thousand meditators in one town miraculously reducing the crime rate.

I’m sure Lynch’s daily meditation habit helps to ground his mind, refresh his creative juices, and enable him to withstand the massive stresses that face any Hollywood player.

I’m not convinced the TM system is, by itself, any more effective than any other meditative regime. However, any human discipline can be more effectively executed with instruction and guidance, such as that provided by the TM organization’s professional trainers.

Catching the Big Fish is beautifully designed, and beautifully written. Just as in his screenplays, which seldom let dialogue get in the way of imagery, his prose is short and sweet and directly propels the narrative line.

Lynch talks only a little about his films, explaining at one point that he doesn’t want his comments to overshadow the works themselves. (This is in a piece about why he doesn’t like DVD commentary tracks.)

When he does talk about his films, it’s in the form of little vignettes. Befitting his early training as a painter, his stories in the book are all about stringing together a succesison momentary images.

He does talk about his new digital-video feature, Inland Empire, and why he’s turned permanently to shooting on video. Previously famous for painstakingly crafting the perfect shot, now Lynch is a total convert to digital video’s flexibility, its versatility, its economy, and its capability for unlimited retakes and experimentation.

And, as you might expect, he discusses the apparent contradiction between his TM-fueled drive for “bliss” and the dark, often violent content in his works:

“There are many, many dark things flowing around in this world now, and omst films reflect the world in which we live. They’re stories. Stories are always going to have conflict. They’re going to have highs and lows, and good and bad….It’s good for the artist to understand conflict and stress. Those things can give you ideas. But I guarantee you, if you have enough stress, you won’t be able to create. And if you have enough conflict, it will just get in the way of your creativity. You can understand conflict, but you don’t have to live in it.”

And, I LOVE what Lynch says about “world peace” as something we should work for, not dismissively joke about.

On this day, which has predictably and tragically become an annual call to fear, that’s as good a message as any:

“May everyone be happy. May everyone be free of disease.May auspiciousness be seen everywhere. May suffering belong to no one.

Peace.”

A male Cinerama employee was accused earlier this week of hiding a video camcorder in the theater’s women’s room.

Reports of this same crime have occurred earlier this year in other cities. At those times, bloggers/pundits (all female) asked out loud why the hell any guy could get off on the sight of a woman on a toilet.

I myself asked the same question out loud in 1999, when Penthouse magazine, in the last years of founder Bob Guccione’s direction, briefly featured professionally-posed pictorials of women urinating.

Such scenes never turned me on. But I tried to figure why anyone else would be.

As best as I could guess, I deduced it must have been something about viewing a woman at a moment when her public persona is as “down” as her slacks.

Sometime circa 2003, I read something by former porn-biz blogger Luke Ford about a porn producer who’d reported some stolen videotape masters or something like that. After the pilf was recovered, a police detective made arrangements to personally deliver it back to the producer. During the handover, the cop said he’d always wanted to meet the porn producer. The cop said he particularly loved XXX videos for the occasional moment when a leading lady, in the peak of passion, would drop all feminine pretense and reveal pure, un-acted emotion.

That moment, I guess, is what toilet fetishists also seek.

But there’s no need to degrade yourself into committing criminal acts in order to play out this fetish (or any other).

In the Internet age, porno images of every kink can be attained quickly and cheaply. Many are created by trained professionals, with unobstructed camera angles and adequate lighting, featuring models who are not only aware and willing but even paid for the job of entertaining you.

…to two of the greatest entertainers and entertainment packages ever.

Merv Griffin was a genius strategic dealmaker who also happened to be a genial talk-show host and made-it-seem-easy raconteur.

I’ve already told my favorite Merv Griffin Show story, about the long Richard Pryor monologue that slowly built up to one big punchline that was completely bleeped. For every moment like that, there were hundreds of smarmy lovefest chats with the likes of Angie Dickinson, Telly Savalas, Helen Gurley Brown, Eva Gabor, Jackie Mason, and Jonathan Winters. As dull as these segments often got, there was at least the promise of some opening repartee with his trumpet player Jack Sheldon (who was also Schoolhouse Rock’s favorite male vocalist).

But Griffin’s real talent was on the business end of the business. A brief outline:

• After stints as a big-band singer and radio personality, the Goodson-Todman game show empire signed him up to host Play Your Hunch, a blatant ripoff of G-T’s own To Tell the Truth.
• After four years of that, NBC signed Griffin in 1962 to host an afternoon talk show. It premiered on the same day (and from the same studio) as Johnny Carson’s first Tonight Show. Some observers believe the network was grooming Griffin as a potential relief pitcher, should Carson’s show flop.
• Carson, obviously, didn’t flop. NBC dropped Griffin’s show. But as part of the contract, Griffin got to place two daytime games on the network. The second of these, premiering in 1964, was Jeopardy!.
• By 1975, NBC’s daytime boss was one Lin Bolen. She believed in modern innovations, such as expanding soap opera episodes from 30 to 60 minutes. She hated legacy game shows with old-man hosts, such as Jeopardy!‘s original host Art Fleming. Bolen moved J! to worse and worse time slots, and finally axed it. But as part of Griffin’s contract, he got to place another daytime game on the network. That was Wheel of Fortune.
• Meanwhile, Griffin had revived his own show in syndication, then moved to CBS late night, then back to syndication, demanding and getting more cash each time.
• By the 1980s he’d successfully placed Wheel in syndication and revived J! as a sister show.
• He sold the whole thang to Columbia Picutres for $250 million and a share of future profits. He built that stake into a “luxury” leisure empire of hotels, casinos, resorts, and race horses.
• But he remained involved in TV production. He produced a kids’ game show, Click, shooting the second of its two seasons in Seattle. (He lived on a yacht moored at south Lake Union during the tapings.) And in his last days he was selling a new show, Let’s Play Crosswords.

His private life was as delightfully kitschy as his talk show. After one failed marriage, he appeared in public with the likes of Gabor and even the widowed Nancy Reagan; while rumors spread of his affections toward poolboys and valets. If true, that meant he had a real self he felt he had to hide from the world, even after he was financially set for life.

ACROSS THE POND, meanwhile, we must say goodbye to Tony Wilson, best known here as the subject of the film 24 Hour Party People. But Wilson’s achievements were too big for one movie (let alone one blog entry):

• He began by hosting a local music TV show in Manchester, welcoming acts the London-based network shows wouldn’t touch.
• He went from there into narrating serious network documentaries, and from there into anchoring Manchester’s only commercial TV newscast.
• On the side, he continued to support new music by cofounding Factory Records, home to Joy Division, New Order, the Happy Mondays, and many more.
• He opened The Hacienda nightclub, where top acts played (and “house” electronic music was partly developed) for 15 years.
• More recently, he became a political activist. His chief cause: “Devolution.” No, not de-evolution, but a crusade to bring more political power to England’s regions, away from London’s central bureaucracies.

Wilson was an honorable man in three often dishonorable professions (music, TV, politics).

And everything he did was informed by his lifelong devotion to his hometown.

He’s someone we could all admire and emulate.

Jack Valenti, who passed away on Thursday, was an LBJ political operative who moved to Hollywood to become the film industry’s spokes-hack, a job he kept for nearly four decades. He masterminded the industry’s move from overt self-censorship to a “ratings” system that essentially accomplished the same goals. Lest we forget, Valenti also tried to outlaw home video. In the name of global media monoliths, his successors still regularly harass file sharers, DVD backup software coders, and other harmless li’l guys.

(From BoingBoing.net, here’s a short 2004-compiled list of “stupid” Valenti quotes about the industry.)

Meanwhile, a real Profile in Courage moment came in Champaign, IL on Wednesday, when Roger Ebert appeared at a film festival he’d cofounded, after losing his voice to cancer surgery. As noted by my ol’ UW Daily pal Jim Emerson, now Ebert’s Webmaster, Ebert’s wife spoke on his behalf at the festival, quoting a line from his screenplay for Russ Meyer’s cult classic Beyond the Valley of the Dolls–a film the likes of which we may never again see from a U.S.-based producer so long as the MPAA’s secretive ratings thugs still hold sway.