From a decade ago, here’s one guy’s prediction of “why DVD would fail” in the home-entertainment marketplace.

form of time-wastin’ is going away, as YouTube.com systematically deletes all the classic cartoon shorts that had been posted there by animation historians and fans.

…three-days-after-Canada-Day day, my apologies for not having written anything for this site in the past week. I could say I’ve been busy, but that would be a mere excuse. I’ve had spare moments away from the search for Vanishing Seattle pix. But I’ve wasted those odd hours and half-hours in such meaningless pursuits as settling old debts, figuring out how to get to the Renton Fry’s Electronics store by Metro bus (the solution: Route #110, a minivan commuter route from the Renton Transit Center), and watching odd YouTube.com contributions (such as “The Worst Looney Tunes Ever,” five pathetic shorts made in 2003 by Simpsons/Family Guy writers).

NOW THEN, TO THE DAY’S TOPIC: Yes, it’s possible to still love your country, even when it repeatedly does stupid, stupid, STUPID things.

Indeed, that’s the only real kind of love there is.

The shut-up-and-obey submission preached by today’s right wing isn’t love. It’s more like the misguided pseudo-love battered spouses sometimes express toward their abusers.

There was a time, within my lifetime if not yours, when conservative fringies were defiantly distrustful of authority figures, particularly if those authority figures represented “big government.” Would that were still the case. Those same fringies were often racist, sexist, and anti-intellectual as hell, but they at least refused to be anyone’s stooge. We could use a little more of that “don’t tread on me” attitude around these days.

…an unofficial SIFF review blog.

David Lynch is now evangelizing for Transcendental Meditation.

• The rediscovery of old film classics thanks to DVD.
• We’re still a two-daily-paper town, at least for now.
• Hi-def TV.
• The strong early sales for my e-book about hi-def TV.
• The so-called Blogosphere, in recent years one of the last uncompromised bastions of democratic debate.
• New awareness of body/mind diversity.
• My father’s long years of slow, pathetic decline finally ended this January.
• I’ve gotten one-third of the way out of my massive personal debt, and should be all clear by year’s end.
• I have a regular print outlet for my work, and am in negotiations about a day job.
• I’ve known some fabulous babes in my day, many with exciting and dynamic careers.
• The many fine products of North America’s convenience foods industry.
• Those who are still willing to fight back against the right-wing sleaze machine.
• Local microbrews.
• Seeing several friends survive debilitating conditions and come back with humor and dignity intact.
• Being back in my favorite neighborhood.
• Being high n’ dry.
• Having a loving, caring, loyal readership. Thank you.

…are rearing their ugly voices again, demanding yet more draconian copy protection schemes.

…has fingered the real culprit in the music industry’s steady downturn—DVDs. The arrival of film as a home-library product, Norman Lebrecht claims, means “it has left the cinema and joined us for drinks, an emancipatory moment for the last of the great western art forms…. The DVD won’t replace the printed book which has withstood more serious threats in the past half-millennium. But it will accelerate the obsolescence of the audio-only disc, which cannot compete much longer in an image-centred culture.”

THE NOVEMBER BELLTOWN MESSENGER is out at last, and may be our best yet. Read it online or seek it at more than 100 dropoff spots.

RAIN HAS ARRIVED SERIOUSLY in greater Puget Sound this morning, meaning the fourth category of autumnal transition has also arrived. (The prior three stages of fall: Labor Day weekend, the equinox, and the “fall back” to Standard Time.)

The grey has settled in. The washed-out watercolor look will be with us, with occasional sunbreaks, for the next three and a half months or so. This is what breaks the spirits of Californians and proves the mettle of real Nor’Westers. Can you take it?

…offers two competing lists of the “Top 50 Cult Films” of all time. I’m proud to say I’ve seen 35 films on the first list and 29 on the second.

Entire generations will grow up never having learned the phrase “Be Kind, Rewind.”

…music videos, mommy?

…in the once-hoppin’ town of Kansas City, our favorite TV critic Aaron Barnhart thinks Wired magazine’s “TV of Tomorrow” issue doesn’t go far enough. Barnhart foresees a TV that’s not just from NY/LA/SF anymore: “…It’s not a stretch to imagine high-quality drama and comedy shows someday originating from St. Paul or Cleveland or Dallas or … or … Kansas City.”

…to what’s on the Wall St. Journal editorial page. But I must concur with animation historian John Canemaker’s eulogy to the demise of Disney animation as we’ve known it.

A Dirty Shame, which I finally viewed on DVD this past Saturday morning, is perhaps John Waters’s masterwork and the greatest socio-political sex comedy of our time.

You can read a plot summary elsewhere, but I’ll just give the short version here: Sylvia Stickles (Tracey Ullman) is a “neuter” (i.e., sexually repressed) Baltimore housewife who lives in a bland house on a bland street and runs a bland convenience store with her husband and her mother (Chris Isaak and Suzanne Shepherd respectively). Her chief annoyance: The growing numbers of “perverts” on her street, including her grown daughter Caprice (Selma Blair with impossible fake breasts).

But a bop on the head during a traffic accident, combined with the “sexual healing” prowess of garage mechanic Ray Ray (Johnny Knoxville of MTV’s Jackass), turns her into another of the “sex addicts” of all persuasions and kinks, who vow to take over the street, the city, and eventually the world. Mother and hubby start a reactionary protest group out to enforce “normal” behavior, and the battle is set for the hearts and crotches of Baltimore.

The sex is all farcical and nudity-free, as befits a GOP-controlled America in which even mentioning glandular drives (other than fear and greed) is an ultimate act of subterfuge.

A whole essay or four could be written about its queer-eyed-for-the-straight-guy utopia of sexual anarchy, and how the forces of “neuter” control naturally see it as a threat (to work, to productivity, to a whole social/aesthetic order of suburban obedience), and the “happy ending” in which Ullman discovers the new kink of head-butting to orgasm.

In our schizoid real world, of course, “pleasure,” even sexual pleasure, is sometimes decried as a sinful departure from the staight-n’-narrow ways. But it’s also exploited in advertising, in the magazines, and on “hip” TV channels as the promised result of buying and owning consumer products; which, for most of us, requires working for The Corporation or its affiliated entities.

Waters’s fucking-in-the-streets utopia, in which everybody’s constantly horny and everything safe and consensual is acceptable, would negate that motivation. People would still work, to some extent. They’d still build and/or acquire homes, perhaps with fully equipped dungeons in the basements. They’d still strive to look good, by their changed standards of looking good (i.e., the adult daughter’s impossible breast implants). And because of the lust/luxury continuum (the words have the same Latin root), other sensual-pleasure based consumerism would still occur (swimming pools, hot tubs, limos with big back seats, foods with aphrodesiac or at least mood-setting properties, role-play costumes, corsets, whips, restraints, and, of course, contraceptives, condoms, and STD treatments).

Also note that Waters avoids potential plot complications that might negate his premise. Minor children are not seen, and are barely mentioned, in the film. The repressed mother mentions syphilis once, but AIDS apparently doesn’t exist in the film’s fictional universe. But the whole notion of the film’s sexual utopia is completely informed by gay culture, whose solidarity and assertiveness have been forged by a quarter century of fighting AIDS.

Ultimately, Waters’s erotic ideal posits straight women and men behaving, well, more like gay men, specifically post-Pride Movement gay men. A Dirty Shame‘s proudly self-proclaimed “sex addicts” define their entire beings by their libidos and their fetishes, and forthrightly demand to tell the whole world about ’em. It’s a world where gays and lesbians are just subsets of desire.

John Waters has given us a glimpse of an all-encompassing, fully-functioning Queer Nation.

You think you know the brutal results of abject paranoia? Wait ’til you read about some of the potential anti-copying schemes on next-generation DVDs!

The above-linked piece is partly based on real rumors and partly on wild speculation; this follow-up attempts to clarify, but only makes matters worse, as the author acknowledges one of the Hollywood studios’ worst rumored schemes might be true. (Said scheme would limit the types of output plugs on new DVD players, so that many existing TVs wouldn’t be able to hook up to them.)