LISTEN UP: Your fave online columnist might be appearing on a local talk-radio outlet soon. Maybe even this Friday. Further details forthcoming.

NOT TOO LONG AGO, I used to gloat to my friends in the rest of Seattle.

I was luckier than they were, because I lived in Summit Cable territory. That meant I got almost 20 cool channels that the losers out in TCI neighborhoods couldn’t.

The tables have since turned. TCI was bought by AT&T, which promptly worked to finish up the fiber-optic cable installations TCI had lagged on for years. Summit, which already had fiber in its downtown and south-end service areas, was bought by a multi-regional company called Millennium Digital Media.

The respective buyers saw new fortunes to be made in cable-modem services and expanded “digital cable” channel selections.

So now, AT&T Cable customers can get the likes of TV Land, BBC America, the Food Network, the Game Show Network, and several other specialty channels offering prime examples of TV programming at its most direct; shows that come close to the Platonic ideals of entertainment and info programming.

Last month, Millennium trotted out its own digital channel lineup. For dozens more bucks a month, you can get dozens more premium and pay-per-view movie channels.

And nothing else.

This is way wrong. Television and video are more than just post-theatrical transmission mechanisms for feature films. TV has its own family of program genres.

A feature film is a one-shot. It’s constructed of scenes, which are constructed of individual shots. Even a low-budget film is made with this kind of rigorous pre-planning.

A TV show is usually an ongoing operation; a premise built to last a hundred episodes or more.

A TV show is built of segments; some of which may intercut across different scenes of action. These segments are, in traditional studio-based productions, made with several cameras running at once; this means individual “scenes” involve continuous flows of acting, movement, etc., rather than individual shots cut together to simulate continuity.

Because of time/money constraints, and the need for ongoing viewer identification with characters, TV shows are much more dialogue-heavy than features.

(Among other effects, this means social-theorists who use TV viewing as evidence of “the decline of words” are almost hilariously misinformed. TV’s all about words; though some of those words are better-chosen than others.)

Movies are about sitting in the dark, with a few friends and a lot of strangers, sharing in one larger-than-life sensory experience. TV’s about sitting comfortably in a well-lit room, alone or with a few pals and/or relatives, paying greater or lesser attention to a succession of smaller-than-life spectacles.

Aside from documentaries and occasional episodic films like Tales From the Darkside, movies are almost always dramatized works telling a single fictional (or fictionalized) story over the course of 80 to 180 minutes.

TV shows, in contrast, encompass episodic sitcoms, ongoing serials, limited-run serials (miniseries), anthology dramas, quasi-anthology dramas (such as crime shows where only the detectives appear in more than one episode), nonfiction storytelling (documentaries, newsmagazines, “reality” shows), and other formats that exist in no other medium.

The success of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? proves that audiences, even in a cable-fragmented TV universe with umpteen movie channels, are still attracted to pure-TV entertainment when it’s done right.

If only Millennium Digital could understand that.

TOMORROW: Are transit authorities passively capitulating to tax-cutters or sneaking an activist end-run around them?

ELSEWHERE:

• This guide to finding titles for would-be blockbuster novels only covers the “The (Noun) (Noun)” variety. It’d have been more interesting if it also included the intercaps “NounVerb” cliche….
• Some borderline-disturbing “Questions For Women” (found by Bring the Rock)….

ANOTHER HOLIDAY SHOPPING SEASON begins tomorrow.

And in Webland, that means one (1) thing: Pundit pieces pondering how much biz the leading e-commerce shopping sites will generate, and what, if anything, the old tangible-location retailers might do in response.

The retail giants might very well be scrambling to confront the online threat in the future. But for now, their attitude seems to be business as usual, or even business more than usual.

Frequent readers to this site know how I’ve been tracking the rise of ever-bigger, ever-more-consolidated chain-store outposts. The accumulated result hit me a couple nights ago when I went on a pre-holiday-rush walking tour of my local brave-new downtown.

Aside from the Bon Marche, the Pike Place Market complex, the Ben Bridge jewelry store, and the Rite Aid (ex-Pay Less, ex-Pay n’ Save) drug store, every major space in Seattle’s retail core had either changed hands, been completely rebuilt, or both in the past 13 or so years. And only a handful of smaller businesses were still where they used to be (among them: M Coy Books, the Mario’s and Butch Blum fashion boutiques, a Sam Goody (nee Musicland) record store, and a Radio Shack).

All else was change. Chains going under (Woolworth, Kress, Klopfenstein’s, J.K. Gill) or pulling out of the region (Loehmann’s) or retreating to the malls (J.C. Penney, Weisfield’s Jewelers, Dania Furniture). Other chains pushing their way in (Borders, Barnes & Noble, Tiffany, Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, Men’s Wearhouse, Sharper Image, Ross Dress for Less, Shoe Pavilion, Warner Bros. Studio Store, Old Navy, FAO Schwarz, etc. etc.). Local mainstays dying off (Frederick & Nelson, the Squire Shops, and now Jay Jacobs); others expanding (Nordstrom, Eddie Bauer, REI, Seattle’s Best Coffee) or at least moving about (Roger’s Clothing for Men).

Now, the ex-Nordstrom building (actually three buildings straddling the same half-block) is reopening, one carved-out individual chain storefront at a time.

(When the building was first being reconfigured, I actually had a dream about the building being turned into artists’ studios; something that now is unlikely to ever happen–unless e-commerce really does bite into old-style retail during the next decade, and these fancy-schmancy chains all pull out at once).

First to open in the ex-Nordstrom was an all-Adidas store that actually looks homey compared to the Niketown a half-block away. Other shops, apparently all chain-owned (including Urban Outfitters) will move into the divvied-up spaces during and after the holiday shop-O-rama time.

But the project’s biggest and most elaborate storefront thus far belongs to Coldwater Creek, selling pseudo-outdoorsy clothes and home furnishings for rich software studs with $2 million “cabins” in the woods or on the water.

It’s a catalog operation based in Sandpoint, ID; a town known in the news for the various far-right nasties (Klansmen, militias, Y2K-survival compounds) who’ve moved to the surrounding countryside. But a more relevant-to-today’s-discussion aspect is Sandpoint’s recent status as one of the “Little Aspens” dotting the inland West, once-rustic little hamlets colonized by Hollywood types (including, in Sandpoint’s case, Nixon lawyer turned game-show host Ben Stein).

Ever since the first department stores first offered the allure of couture-style fashions without custom-made prices, upscale retailers have been in the biz of selling fantasies. The fantasy sold by Coldwater Creek is the one sold in SUV ads. The fantasy of living “on the land” without having to work on it, without being dependent upon a rural economy.

It’s the fantasy depicted in magazine puff pieces about folks like Ted Turner in Montana and Harrison Ford in Wyoming–the sort of folks I described a couple weeks back as pretending to “get away from it all” while really bringing “it all” with them. Folks who commute from their work in other states by private plane, then preach to the locals (or to those locals who haven’t been priced out of the place) about eco-consciousness and living lightly.

TOMORROW: Continuing this topic, a hypermarket chain takes over a steel-mill site and builds a store that looks like a steel mill.

IN OTHER NEWS: The outfit known for syrupy background music, AND which employed innumerable loud-guitar musicians in day jobs, is moving away.

ELSEWHERE:

• Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the movies….
• Just because I’ve read at one of their stores doesn’t mean I can’t share a cheap gag at a chain bookstore’s expense (found by Camworld)….
• The Bud Girls aren’t the first instance of companies trying to associate beer with one’s first beverage (found by the Obscure Store and Reading Room)….

ONE OF MY FAVORITE Net-centric literary forms is the funny list. Not necessarily the faux-Letterman type, but the more informal, longer, add-on-your-own type.

Among my favorites: The “Ways to Annoy Your Roommate” list.

A few days ago, I suddenly had an idea for a perfect annoy-your-roommate concept that I hadn’t seen on any such lists: Rent porn videos, and fast-forward past everything EXCEPT the dialogue scenes.

That simple idea led to a more elaborate one: Rent porn videos, and then use a second VCR to copy only the dialogue scenes.

Then I got to thinking: These throwaway plot parts constitute one of today’s most ephemeral commercial-art genres. A genre that should be studied and preserved.

That one notion, natch, led to more.

There are plenty of such genres and forms, still underdocumented by a popcult-scholar racket still obsessed with Madonna deconstructions. Here are some:

• ‘Annoy Your Roommate’ lists and their ilk themselves.
• Chat rooms. My ol’ pal Rob Wittig insists, “I’m convinced we’re living in the Golden Age of Correspondence — comparable to Shakespeare’s era.” A few people have tried to create email novels as late-modern updates to the 19th-century epistolary novel. Wittig’s now working on a chat-room novel, a larger-scale version of the email novel with more characters “on stage” at once and with the added premise that the characters are “typing” their lines in real time.
• Telemarketing scripts and junk-phone-call recordings. In some future, more enlightened age, citizens will wonder why companies ever thought such intimately annoying messages could persuade.
• Movie and TV spinoff novels. Cousins of, and oft confused with, tie-in novels (the ones that reiterate the on-screen stories, which themselves are sometimes based on a prior novel). Examples: The Star Wars paperbacks that starred Han Solo and Chewbacca (and none of the other movie characters); or the Brady Bunch and Partridge Family mystery novels (a young Dean Koontz supposedly wrote some of these under pseudonymns).
• Internet-company promo trinkets. Anyone who goes to the High Tech Career Expo or a computer convention gets tons of ’em: Caps, T-shirts, Frisbees, yo-yos, hacky-sack balls, pen-and-pencil sets, coffee mugs, and other semi-ephemeral goods bearing the logos of companies whose only physical presence might be rented office space, whose “products” exist only on server files, and whose prospects for survival (or even profitability) are anyone’s guess.

  Somebody already put out a picture book showing old Apple Computer employee T-shirts. Somebody else could create a similar, but fictional, book using logos and slogans to depict the rise and fall of an Internet startup from its first big idea, to its venture-capital phase, to its unsuccessful IPO attempt, to its “restructuring for the future” downsizing phase, to its Chapter 11 reorganization, to its last appearance on a shirt “celebrating” another company’s acquisition of its remaining assets.

TOMORROW: A newspaper for the digital age.

ELSEWHERE:

• I can remember when high-school girls were kicked out of school for wearing jeans–i.e., not showing enough skin….
• “Genetic engineers have proposed a tree which grows its own lights.” (Found by EatonWeb)….
• Harry Stephen Keeler didn’t really write mysteries but “coincidence porn” (found by Arts & Letters Daily)….
• Seattle’s now #3 on somebody’s annual “Good Places to Live” survey, weighted toward supposed middle- and upper-middle-class priorities (cost of single-family homes, personal security, supply of professional jobs, etc.). #1: Salt Lake (apparently, nightlife and ethnic diversity aren’t on the survey’s criteria)….

AS PREVIOUSLY NOTED, my cable company finally restored the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. to my local cable lineup recently.

CBC’s got a lot of great Canadian-made programming (though its audiences and budgets have fallen during the Cable Age, as have those of the old-line U.S. networks).

But my favorite CBC attraction is a British import, the prime-time soap Coronation Street.

“The Street,” as it’s called in the UK tabloid press, will begin its 40th year this December. Most of those years it’s been the country’s most popular show, and the backbone of the commercial ITV network.

But you’ve probably never seen it. Apart from northern U.S. regions that get CBC, the show’s only Stateside exposure came when the USA Network ran it for a few months in the early ’80s, as part of a package deal to get reruns of the miniseries Brideshead Revisited (both shows are from the Granada production company). But American audiences apparently couldn’t decipher some of the characters’ heavy Yorkshire accents; USA dropped the show as soon as it contractually could.

So in 1985, when the BBC devised its own Street knockoff show, EastEnders, they made sure the characters would all be comprehensible when the show was shipped Stateside. Thus, EastEnders plays to loyal audiences on scattered PBS afiliates and the BBC America cable channel.

But there’s nothing like the original.

The Street has a feel all its own. It comes from the “music” of the accents and the dialogue (like EastEnders, Coronation Street uses no background music), the rhythm and pacing of the scenes (few lasting longer than a minute), the lovable non-“beauty” of the cast (even the teenage characters are as awkward-looking as real-life teens often believe themselves to be), the character-driven storylines, and the respect the show gives both to its audience and to its working-class characters.

The Street was launched when “kitchen sink” realism was all the rage in British literary and film drama. The show reflects that era in its tightly-sewn format, chronicling some two dozen people who live and/or work on a single block in a fictional industrial town outside Manchester.

There’s no glamour (the show’s wealthiest character merely owns a small garment factory), and no overwrought melodrama beyond the limited scope and ambitions of the characters.

What there is, is a community–an extended, close-knit, multi-generational family of people who may argue and fight and cheat but who ultimately love one another. Just the sort of community that late-modern suburban North America sorely lacks, and which those “New Urbanist” advocates always talk about trying to bring back.

A couple years back, CBC began its own Street imitation, Riverdale (no relation to the town in Archie Comics). While Riverdale’s creators seem to have made every effort to replicate every possible element of the Street formula, it doesn’t quite translate. Riverdale’s relatively emotionally-repressed Ontarians, living in relatively large, set-back private homes rather than the Street’s row houses, have far less of the interaction and adhesion seen on the Street.

USA’s said to be developing its own working-class evening soap along the Coronation Street/EastEnders/Riverdale style. It’ll be interesting to see if the formula can even work in the setting of today’s disconnected American cityscape.

IN OTHER NEWS: Another Northwest Bookfest came and went. This year, it was moved from the funky ol’ rotting Pier 63 to the clean, spacious (and about to be made even more spacious) Washington State Convention Center. While the move was made for practical, logistical reasons, it could also be interpreted as signifying a move “up” from the homey, rustic realm of the Northwest-writing stereotype (beach poetry, low-key “quirky” mysteries, and snow falling on you-know-what). Even litter-a-chur, the festival’s new setting implies, has gotta get with the program and become just as aggressively upscale and as fashionably commercial as everything else in Seatown’s becoming.

TOMORROW: Strange junk e-mails and other fun stuff.

ELSEWHERE:

• Every time I read a women-only panel discussion about porn videos, I long to one day see a buncha guys discussing Harlequin novels as if they accurately represented all women’s real desires. (I’m sure some semiotics prof has done such an essay, but damned if I’m gonna read any more deconstructionist theory than I have to.)…

LET’S TRY TO GET THIS STRAIGHT. A couple weeks ago, a teenage boy from the Seattle suburbs was hospitalized for severe injuries, following a backyard boxing match that got a little out of hand. News media immediately branded the incident as an obvious copycat of the movie Fight Club.

Then, a few days later, the mom of the injured boy revealed that he and most of the other kids involved in the bout hadn’t seen Fight Club, but had simply been attempting to emulate their real-life boxing heroes.

On the immediate level, it doesn’t matter whether the kid wanted to be Brad Pitt or Ali. It still got him a night in intensive care. On another level, it shows how today’s ever-more-tabloidy media are oh-so willing to exploit personal tragedies, and to believe and spread silly hype angles concerning these incidents.

But the differences go deeper.

Fight Club, based on a novel by Portland writer Chuck Palahniuk (a book described to me by one reader as “a novel clearly written to be made into a movie”), posits a present-day dystopia in which emasculated, office-cubicle-imprisoned, studly white guys have few options to reclaim themselves. Our antihero first sits in on other people’s self-help and 12-step groups, then falls in with a gang of white-collar nihilists who get their kicks in bare-knuckle extreme fighting. Then, the charismatic gang leader reveals himself to have loftier, even more violent ambitions. The “Club” adopts a Manson-esque agenda of generating random violence in order to cause a general state of chaos.

Thankfully, the real world isn’t in such a sorry state.

What the suburban teens were doing was undoubtedly just good old fashioned male bonding via competition. Something young males have done at least since the days of ancient Sparta. One of the boys landed a heavier punch than he’d intended to. But that sort of thing, alas, happens–just as boys can get hurt in more organized sport competitions.

For a good view of the positive values of bloodsport, check out the Canadian movie Les Boys. It’s not on video Stateside (I saw it on Cinemax), but the amiable hockey comedy was one of Canada’s top box-office draws in ’97 and has spawned two sequels.

It stars Marc Messier (no relation to real hockey star Mark Messier) as a middle-aged, small-town Quebec bar owner who leads an amateur hockey team. The minimal plot involves his gambling debt to a small-time hood, which leads to a game between Les Boys and a team of the hood’s hand-picked thugs with ownership of the bar at stake. The real attractions are the characters of Les Boys. They joke and banter, they check and fight, they shoot, they score.

More importantly, they live in a real community. One that recognizes the need for Boys’ Night Out. One that realizes testosteronic rages, when safely expressed in the proper context, might lead to permanent knee damage but also to enduring friendships, stronger families, and a personal pride (even in defeat) that can help one overcome the daily grind.

MONDAY: Can you tell me how to get–how to get to Coronation Street?

ELSEWHERE:

• A site devoted to collecting every known cover version of the ’72 synth-pop classic “Popcorn!” (found by Memepool)….
• My kinda magazine: Prepared Foods! Organic liquor, vodka coolers, fatty-acid fruit juice, “Curry in a Hurry,” and pate for kids with alien-head designs in every slice!

  A pompous profile of the in-between generation that fails to mention punk rock, hiphop, zines, or any cultural artifacts more “indie” than Indiana Jones….

(Advisory: Today’s installment deals with topics some readers might find kinda gross.)

IN THE ’80S, RON HARRIS created and produced the TV exercise shows Aerobicise and The :20 Minute Workout.

You may remember them as the shows with the ever-perky spandex queens thrusting their butts out while on a slowly-turning white turntable, before an equally stark white backdrop.

Aerobicise, which aired on Showtime, treated the exercises as a voyeuristic spectator sport. Scenes were shot to emphasize “arty” camera angles and close-up body parts in motion, rather than to show how viewers could imitate any particular sequence of movements.

The syndicated :20 Minute Workout (excerpted during a scene in Earth Girls Are Easy) at least purported to be a participatory, instructional show. (The heavily Southern-accented hostess tried to make a catch phrase out of “Fo’ mo’, three mo’, two mo,’ and one. Take it down.”)

While the shows made no legally-binding promises to viewers, they certainly implied that you could work your way toward a supermodel physique.

Later, Harris went on to producing softcore “erotic” videos for Playboy and his own production company. These used the same turntable set and similar body-choreography as Aerobicise, but showing skin instead of skin-tight suits.

Now, Harris is embarking on a publicity stunt of questionable taste which essentially says no, workouts won’t work out. Ya gotta be born beautiful ‘n’ sexy.

Or, to quote a slogan on the site selling stills from Harris’s nudie videos, “Not all pussy was created equal.”

To add to the overall air of sleaze surrounding Harris’s supposed online auction of glamour-model eggs, the USA Today story about it quotes a couple of the models as saying they’re doing this because they don’t want to pose nude to pay their bills; even though Harris’s video and photo sites promise un-augmented breasts, full spread shots, and lotsa hot girl-on-girl action.

(The models on the egg-auction site are not identified as having ever worked on Harris’s other projects. But Feed found a few faces that appeared on “Ron’s Angels” and also on Harris’s more explicit sites.)

Even odder, Harris claims on his auction site that you might as well buy into the kinds of prejudices denounced in books like The Beauty Myth. “Choosing eggs from beautiful women,” Harris vows, “will profoundly increase the success of your children and your children’s children, for centuries to come.”

Particularly if they’re willing to appear in “tasteful” photo shoots called “Girls Who Love Girls.” (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

In the end, word finally filtered up to clueless mainstream news media that this was, indeed, almost certainly a cyberhoax.

Maybe Harris is a better showman than I’d given him credit for. Maybe his next stunt could pretend to offer the eggs or sperm of clever hustlers, for parents who want to raise future Net entrepreneurs.

IN OTHER NEWS: My cable company’s just started showing ZDTV, the all-computer-news channel–sorta. On the cable system’s schedule channel, where the TV Guide Channel video inserts normally go in a quarter or a half of the screen, I’m getting that portion of the visual portion of ZDTV. The TV Guide Channel audio remains, leading to some quite interesting juxtapositions–particularly during commercial breaks….

MONDAY: Postmodern fiction, trashing old hierarchies or just building new ones?

ELSEWHERE:

• You had to know egg-auction parody sites would quickly show up….
• This fake sex-machine ad would be funny if I weren’t suspicious somebody somewhere’s trying to invent something like it for real (found by Bud)….

I WAS ASKED by the editors of Resonance to participate in their year-end issue’s survey of various critics’ musical “guilty pleasures” of the past decade.

Being the shameless guy I am, I replied that there was nothing I’ve liked over the past 10 years that I particularly felt guilty about.

Nevertheless, I was able to provide the magazine with a few choice discs that other critics might wish me to feel guilty about liking. The mag declined to include any of them on its final list, which turned out to specialize in discs that had received both commercial popularity and critical disdain.

(Some of these following discs I’ve mentioned in prior articles on this site.)

• SAM SPENCE The Power and the Glory: Original Music and Voices of NFL Films (Tommy Boy)

  American football is a patiently-paced game of pre-choreographed plays, executed by players whose faces you can’t see. NFL Films turns this into narratives of personal heroism, and these stirringly-cliched themes are a big part of that transformative process.

• VARIOUS ARTISTS Music for TV Dinners, Vols. 1 and 2 (Scamp/Caroline)

  Fifties and Sixties leftovers from a stock-music library, which had lent them out for everything from commercials and educational films to ‘Ren & Stimpy’ and Russ Meyer movies.

• VARIOUS ARTISTS South End All Stars (Collective Fruit)

  One day, when the true obscurities of “Seattle Scene”-era music are fully appreciated by rarities collectors, this compilation will find its due. The band names alone will be worth the eBay auction price (Rhino Humpers, Tramps of Panic, Spontaneous Funk Whorehouse, Queer the Pitch, Stir the Possum)!

• CHURN Titus (Laundry Room)

  More relics from the early “We’re Notgrunge, Dammit!” era of local indie bands (late ’93). Still sounds grungier than most of the fake-grunge bands from L.A. and London the major labels were hyping at the time.

• EDWYN COLLINS I’m Not Following You (Setanta)

  Pleasant, insubstantial, Birthday Party-esque twee pop and pseudo-neo-disco.

• RICHARD PETERSON Love on the Golf Course (PopLlama)

  Easy-listening music with a true hard edge (not a posed “atittude”), by a lifetime street musician expressing his fantasies of a leisurely life he’s thus far never gotten to live.

• BLACK VELVET FLAG Come Recline (Go Kart)

  Lounge arrangements of punk classics–a surefire formula for good times! I’ve done it myself. Try it in your own home.

• PSYCLONE RANGERS The Devil May Care (World Domination)

  Loud, stoopid, un-self-conscious, fun garage-punk from Pennsylvania. So the songs all sound the same; so what?

• VARIOUS ARTISTS Planet Squeezebox (Ellipsis Arts box set)

  The mighty accordion and its variants, as heard on three continents–proof that so-called “world music” need not be laid back or mellow.

• KALYANJI, ANANDJI Bombay the Hard Way (Motel)

  India movie music–proof that so-called “world music” need not be folksome or less than ruthlessly commercial. If there’s a “guilty” part to this pleasure, it’s in the unnecessarily campy new song titles and the dance-floor-friendly remixing added to the tracks in this collection.

IN OTHER NEWS: It’s a sad day for fans of Happy Kyne and the Mirth Makers.

TOMORROW: An “off-off-year” election brings leftish “progressives” and rightish “populists” against a common foe, the corporate middle-of-the-road.

ELSEWHERE:

• Life’s not a movie, so why so much background music? (Hey, if life were a movie, I’d demand a stunt double….)
• This site imitates chicken restaurants right….

AESTHETIC DISCIPLINE, as the Oulipo guys keep proclaiming, is the real key to creativity.

Four filmmakers in Denmark took this notion to heart when they came up with the Dogme 95 movement.

Among the points of the movement’s “Vow of Chastity”:

• Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in.
• The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot).
• The camera must be hand-held.
• The film must be in color. Special lighting is not acceptable.
• The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
• The film takes place here and now.
• Genre movies are not acceptable.
• The film format must be Academy 35 mm. [I.e., not widescreen.]
• The director must not be credited.
• I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.

Just about all of these disciplines had appeared in many indie and art films over the years (though not all in the same film), from Godard’s Weekend to Cassavetes’s Husbands. What the Dogme instigators did was codify a particular set of disciplines devised for a maximum sense of “realism.”

Three “officially certified” Dogme films have been made thus far. The first to get a U.S. release is The Celebration, by Thomas Vinterberg. Far from the spare “kitchen-sink” movie the above Dogme disciplines might make you imagine, it’s a vast, intense, tragic drama of suppressed secrets, predicated upon a family reunion dinner in which a young man “toasts” his father’s birthday by outing the old man as a child molester.

The Celebration sports just-beneath-the-top performances by a huge cast, colorful locations and costumes, tautly-framed shots, and flashy editing and sound mixing. It’s not a filmed play; it’s a real movie.

And it’s a good point-O-comparison with a more popular handheld-camera-shot movie, The Blair Witch Project.

You who have seen Blair Witch can see where it conforms to and differs from the Dogme format. It’s partly in black-and-white and it has a “genre” (horror) premise, two things Dogme disallows.

But it has no background music or special effects. It covers a specific set of characters through a specific sequence of actions in a specific time and place. It’s filmed on real locations (no studio sets). The protagonists’ violent fate is not overtly shown. It’s not a spectacle of gore but a character study (albeit with sometimes borderline-insuffrable characters).

The Celebration shows how filmmaking techniques can be pared away to make “realistic” stories more intimate. Blair Witch shows how a similar minimalism can make a “genre” story seem more real.

Both films point the way toward a possible post-blockbuster future for the cinema.

MONDAY: Guilty-pleasure music.

ELSEWHERE:

• A site that asks, can Canadians really write sexy?…
• The new ghettos: The places without ADSL….

TO OUR LOCAL READERS: You’ve still one week to see the Pacific Science Center’s traveling exhibit honoring the career of Japanese cartoon pioneer Osamu Tezuka.

The exhibit (organized by the official Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum in Japan) is a small one, but it’s packed with power, pathos, and inspiration–just like Tezuka’s most enduring character, the flying child-robot hero Mighty Atom, a.k.a. Astro Boy.

The exhibit consists of four video screens, a couple dozen panel displays, and a giant Astro Boy balloon figure “flying” on the ceiling. The panels chronicle Tezuka’s best known print and TV cartoon series through original cels and comic-book art. The video monitors play prime examples, not only of Tezuka’s own works but of the Japanese animation industry before and after his influence took hold.

A trained M.D. and a devout post-WWII pacifist, Tezuka (1928-89) brought a sense of morality and beauty to his work. His stories were “educational” without being preachy, because he used childlike characters such as Astro and Kimba the White Lion (the all-but-official inspiration for The Lion King to teach the kids about the complexities of life and of caring for one’s fellow creatures.

If Tezuka was a prime example of postwar Japanese antimilitarism, he was also a prime example of postwar Japanese capitalism. He had several serials running in different children’s magazines simultaneously, keeping the reprint and character-licensing rights.

The exhibit claims he produced 150,000 comic-book pages over his 41-year career. That averages out to almost 75 pages a week, a figure almost impossible without a cadre of assistants.

But he didn’t just produce quantity. He added many “cinematic” visual techniques and complex storylines (some of which stretched out over years) to what had been a formulaic manga scene.

Some critics might argue that manga’s still a formulaic scene; but Tezuka added many more ingredients to the formula. His influence brought a popularity (and an adult audience) to comics in Japan that the medium still has to fight for here.

These advances in technique worked to prepare Tezuka’s team for moving beyond elaborate-but-still drawings into primitive animation. Starting in 1961 (Astro Boy was Japan’s first TV cartoon series), he adapted many of his works for the small screen, produced by his own studio using, and expanding upon, Hanna-Barbera’s newly-established time-and-money-saving techniques (collectively known as “limited animation”).

Having already worked for over a decade at making print comics seem “cinematic,” Tezuka and his team were able to create stirring adventure stories and likeable characters on paltry early-TV budgets.

And as the boss of his own studio, animating characters already well-known in print form, Tezuka held a degree of both creative and business control U.S. TV animation has almost never seen, then or now. He used that authority to “smarten up” his shows with complex storylines, involving characters audiences could identify with.

Today, Tezuka is revered in his homeland and among the global manga/anime cult as “the God of Anime.” A review of the exhibit bore an unfortunately misleading headline, which may have sent kids in expecting to see Pokemon characters. Tezuka didn’t create Pokemon; he merely established the story structure, drawing style, and aesthetic tone which Pokemon, and dozens of other Japanese print, TV, and theatrical cartoon products have followed, to varying degrees of success.

If there’s a note-O-irony in this story, it’s that Tezuka, who regularly placed environmental messages into his stories, almost singlehandedly created an industry that destroys old-growth forests throught Asia (and imports whole logs from the U.S. Northwest) to make millions of throwaway, phone-book-sized manga magazines every week.

TOMORROW: Top candy picks for this Halloween.

ELSEWHERE:

• “No fat guy would ever dream of making a move on a girl without first feeding her a nice meal….”
• Bread that’s way past its pull date….
• Who could possibly be against tributes to motherhood?…

YESTERDAY, we discussed one way for contemporary visual artists to survive in a boomtown era of rising rents and stagnant incomes–work for advertisers.

But not everybody’s suited for painting corporate-friendly images onto five-foot-tall fiberglass coffee mugs. And a few commercial commissions don’t by themselves solve the problem of alterna-art’s place in urban society.

Ex-Stranger theater critic Matt Richter claims to have a potential answer: Consolidate.

Consolidated Works, the new exhibition/performance space Richter and Meg Shiffler just opened in Seattle, is, on one level, an attempt to make alterna-art into a series of Big Events (big enough to get big newspaper coverage and attract big donations). It ain’t no little hole-in-the-wall gallery space; it’s a 30,000-square-foot ex-warehouse, arranged like a movie multiplex into three big rooms (film and live-stage theaters surrounding a visual-art exhibition area).

Not only will the three areas feed audiences to one another, but their programming will be coordinated under overarching themes (the first, showing thru the end of November, is “Artificial Life”).

While the existing Center on Contemporary Art also arranges one or two “theme” shows per exhibition season, it mainly mounts or imports single-artist (or single-group-of-artists) installations. Good for aesthetic unity, but not as good for marketing as CW’s big-event concepts. COCA regularly schedules music and discussion events as adjuncts to its visual-art presentations, but CW’s more ambitious scheme is to give equal emphasis to visuals, performance, and film/video.

One thing CW is doing that COCA originally did is to start out by building the organization (and the fundraising) before settling into a permanent space. CW’s current ex-warehouse building is rented cheaply from Paul Allen, who will raze the building early next year (shortly before he razes the Kingdome). CW plans to keep mounting huge shows in temporary quarters at soon-to-be condo or office sites, while soliciting business-community support for a building it would eventually own.

By being big enough from Day One to compete with other bigtime organizations for software-millionaires’ dough, CW hopes to stem the recent arts-funding trends that have seen hundreds of millions going to fancy new buildings for the big prestigious institutions (next in line for a new palace: the Seattle Opera), while second-tier outfits like COCA stagnate and DIY-level outfits (fringe theaters, alterna-galleries, studio spaces) are threatened by the lack of affordable spaces.

But you can easily see the limitations built into the concept.

For one thing, works that don’t easily fit into one of CW’s scheduled big-theme concepts, that’s too idiosyncratic or too astray from what other artists are currently up to, might not get in there. And any big institution runs the risk of over-institutionalization, letting artistic decisions become subsurvient to bureaucratic or fundraising considerations. And it doesn’t solve the space problems faced by established-but-smaller organizations.

But for now, let’s welcome the Consolidated Works concept. If it works, it just might be copyable elsewhere, igniting new levels of public interest in alternate visions.

IN OTHER NEWS: So much for Seattle’s supposed “civility”….

TOMORROW: The music everybody but me likes.

ELSEWHERE:

• The most Seattle- (and Spokane)-centric issue ever of Wired is finally online….
• How to sell Net-sex in Brazil (found by Memepool….)
• “Net.art… is becoming *the* new art form, the ultimate one….” (found by Metascene)
• How to clean your toilet bowl with Coca-Cola….
• “Sit down with the jeans and explain how you feel about grass stains. Try to make ‘I’ statements, such as, ‘I don’t like the grass stains you have’ rather than ‘You’re too stained….'”

AS IT APPARENTLY MUST to all local non-news TV shows in the U.S. these days, death came this summer to Almost Live, for 15 years an only-in-Seattle institution. (OK it was syndicated in two nonconsecutive years, and the national kiddie show Bill Nye the Science Guy was essentially an AL spinoff, but you get the idea.) The last AL reruns may have left the familiar Saturday time slot by the time you read this, with only occasional specials to be commissioned by KING-TV (the first is this Saturday). The cast members made an appearance earlier this month on their longtime spoof-target, KOMO’s Northwest Afternoon, during which they congratulated NWA for not having been cancelled yet.)

Theoretically, the cast (or however many members of it would be willing) could go to work for another station. But since none of those other stations seem any more interested in local entertainment fare than KING was (although Fox affilliate KCPQ’s reportedly pondering a morning show), that seems unlikely.

Call me overly optimistic, but I used to believe the increasing bevy of broadcast and cable channels would mean more opportunities for different kinds of shows–even shows that seamlessly mixed droll, low-key humor, broad sketch comedy, and cheap-shot jokes about local politicians.

Sure, a week’s episode might contain its share of groaners and easy gags. (The series almost never used writers beyond the eight cast members, two of whom also doubled as producer and director.)

But even in its weaker moments, AL had a pulse and a look all its own. And it exemplified a particularly Nor’Wester flavor of off-center humor. You could find traces of this in the writings of Lynda Barry (an old pal of AL host John Keister); the biting TV and print works of Matt Groening (an old pal of Barry); the cartoons of Jim Woodring, Gary Larson, Ellen Forney, et al.; the sardonic song lyrics of Scott McCaughey and Chris Ballew; and such former area-TV staples as Stan Boreson, J.P. Patches, and Spud Goodman.

Could anything like it appear again? Well, maybe.

Late last month, I got into a well-publicized preview screening for Doomed Planet, a shot-on-video movie directed by Alex Mayer and written by George Clark (who previously had created two issues of a Stranger parody tabloid, only to find most of their readers thought the Stranger staff had parodied itself).

Within a loose plotline involving two warring religious cults (a cult of sex-happy hippies vs. a cult of Armageddon-predicting Goths), the videomakers weaved in quite a bit of AL-esque bits, from genre-movie minispoofs to local popcult references (a fictionalized version of Mary Kay LeTourneau makes a brief appearance) to an atmosphere of knowing, late-century-cynical neo-burlesque.

While Doomed Planet, at least in the cut shown at the screening, is a much more rough-hewn work than Almost Live ever was (some of Mayer’s large, unpaid cast didn’t really know about comic timing, and much of the sound was muddied), it’s nice to know the no-budget, no-hype, no-pretensions NW comic spirit lives on.

IN OTHER NEWS: Another sign of hope for regionalism within the global-media landscape is Turner South, a new entertainment-and-sports cable channel to be offered only to cable systems in the southeastern states. I’d love an attempt at something like that up here; even though a NW entertainment channel would have fewer pre-existing movies and rerun series to prop up its schedule than a Southern channel would.

TOMORROW: That new alternative-art patron, Procter & Gamble.

ELSEWHERE:

• A writing instructor insists, “It’s our duty to be explicit, to allow our characters good wholesome sex….”
• Aside from the irony of a “health food” company eventually ending up making Pop-Tarts, this scholarly essay provides a necessary reminder of the link between supposedly “healthy” diets and sexual fears. Both ultimately express a desire for a tidier, more rational life than our biological forms really need….
• “Ninety-nine plastic bottles of beer on the wall….” (found by Julienne)

NOT LONG AGO, in a galaxy superficially similar to this one, Film-with-a-capital-F was an art form.

North American “independent” filmmakers were auteurs working outside the studio system, not merely ambitious Tarantino-wannabes trying to break into that system.

And films from other lands, made in other languages, could be regularly viewed in every major U.S. and Canadian city and many minor ones. Many of these films revealed the ways people in those other places lived and dreamed.

A reminder of this forgotten era came recently when Landmark Theatres launched a 25th-anniversary promotion, including a contest to name the best foreign-language films ever released Stateside.

Get past the address form and demographic survey (the real reasons for the contest’s existence), and you get a list of 600 films from which you can choose up to five (or write-in your own). (The list excludes many potentials, such as Sweet Movie, Princess Tam Tam, Arabian Nights, and Dreams.)

I figure I’ve seen about 120 of them, which immediately set me to compiling a list of ones I’ve gotta rent.

The list also got me thinking about the circumstances under which I’d seen the ones I’d seen.

Most of the local theaters I’d seen them in are still around (except for the Ridgemont, North End, Broadway, and University); most of the extant ones are run by Landmark. And the Seattle International Film Festival’s still going strong.

But something’s been lost. Something beyond local control.

The foreign-film marketing infrastructure’s been decimated, or at least diluted. Many of the distributors that used to nurture these precious obscurities in the domestic marketplace have either folded or become subsidiaries of the Hollywood majors. (The latter have become, in the words of critic R. Ruby Rich,“a kind of Harvey Weinstein try-out school for Hollywood.”)

The remaining second- and third-tier distributors are typically less devoted to foreign movies than to “Amerindie” movies; less interested in broadening the medium’s boundaries than in Sundance Festival deal-wrangling; less concerned about art and expression than in promoting the Next Pulp Fiction or the Next Blair Witch Project.

Video has, thus far, proved to be something less than art-film’s savior; except in a few larger stores in a few larger metro areas. Otherwise, the major studios have successfully convinced stores to order 100 copies of Analyze This and none of Black Cat, White Cat or West Beirut (two of the only three foreign-language listings on Entertainment Weekly’s current movie-review web page).

The globalization of the entertainment biz under a few conglomerates has also helped decrease the supply of non-North American films, especially from countries like Hong Kong that have seen their own international markets glutted by U.S. violence and “hip”-violence fare.

The highly-hyped Romance (the third foreign-language film on the EW review page), promising unprecedented levels of explicitly-sexual French existential ennui, can’t turn the situation around by itself. But, if we’re lucky, it might provide the necessary spark to help re-ignite hipster-America’s onetime love affair with world cinema.

MONDAY: Could direct-to-video moviemakers and new cable channels be the savior of regional humor?

ELSEWHERE:

• One reviewer’s bogeyman for modern cinema? “It is the independent film movement. And it has been a total failure….”
• Another threat to film-as-art: “The Attack of the 50 Foot Marketers”
• “Nowhere else will you find a site as devoted to disaster movies as Disaster Online” (found by Memepool)….
• How can you believe any 100-Worst-Films list that doesn’t even include Showgirls or The Postman? (Found by Kotke)….
• How can you believe any Sexiest-People-of-the-Millennium list that doesn’t even include Tura Sultana (and DOES include Bill Gates)?…

CORPORATE-MEDIA REACTIONS TO THE INTERNET have come in waves. The “Threat To Our Children” wave. The “Threat To Common Discourse” wave. The “E-Commerce” wave.

(Funny, I always thought “E-Commerce” was what happened in the parking lots outside rave dances.)

Now, there’s another wave, and it’s something corporate media absolutely luuvvv, at least in principle.

The Net, according to the newest Received Idea, is indeed good for one thing.

Selling movie tickets.

By now, even people who haven’t seen The Blair Witch Project are totally familiar with the film, its plot, its premise, and, most prominently of all, the hype. The simultaneous Time and Newsweek cover stories. The cast’s appearance on the MTV Video Music Awards. The endless repetition, from Entertainment Weekly to the New York Observer, of the filmmakers’ success-story legend–how a next-to-no-budget indie horror film became a huge hit thanks to “word of mouth” publicity on the Net.

A more careful look at the story, though, reveals something much less “spontaneous” yet simultaneously more interesting to corporate-media types.

Blair Witch turns out to have been a marriage made in marketing heaven, a three-way match between the economics/aesthetics of ’90s Fringe-Indie filmmaking, the Net’s genre-film fan base, and good old-fashioned B-movie hucksterism.

From the indie-film craze, the Blair Witch filmmakers got a whole language of “looks” and shticks: College-age, unknown actors; wobbly camera work (some shot on video); the gimmicks of fake-documentary shooting and characters talking into the camera; and other assorted means of turning a lack of production resources into a feeling of immediacy and a sort of realism.

From the scifi/horror fan community online, distributors Artisan Entertainment found a ready-made audience, with highly articulated opinions on what it liked and disliked in genre movies (a marketer’s wet dream!). Artisan could fashion a campaign promising everything real fans wanted, while making the film’s cheapness into an asset.

From the exploitation tradition, Artisan learned the importance of spending more money selling the movie than the filmmakers had spent making it. The studio put up a big website (that never mentioned the story’s fictional), slipped preview tapes and screening passes to influential online reviewers, planted preview stories in “alternative” papers, and generally sucked up to a fan community used to being treated as an afterthought by the big studios.

The result: A return-on-investment Roger Corman probably never even dreamed of.

But what happens when a movie gets the fan-site treatment, the newsgroup recommendations, and the chat room praise, but without the distributor’s puppet-strings directly or indirectly manipulating it all?

You get The Iron Giant.

A movie described by gushing fans as representing everything from the first successful U.S.-made adaptation of Japanese adventure-anime conventions to the potential harbinger of a new era in animated features. A movie praised and re-praised on darn near every weblog site and online filmzine as a refreshingly serious, grownup animated film.

But after the box-office nonsuccess of Space Jam, Quest for Camelot, and The King and I, Warner Bros. seems to have little remaining faith in its feature-animation unit.

The Iron Giant was released in the dog days of August, with nominal TV advertising (chiefly on the Kids WB cartoon shows), almost no merchandising tie-ins (even at the Warner Studio Store), and a nice-looking yet perfunctory website.

What’s probably singlehandedly kept the film in the theatres for seven weeks (at least in some parts of the country) has been the Net word-O-mouth. Real word-O-mouth, with little or no studio push or even studio attention.

The Iron Giant cost a lot more to make than The Blair Witch Project, so it won’t be easy to compare the effectiveness of each film’s free online fan publicity.

But it’s clear which one’s the real netfan-championed underdog, for whatever that’s worth.