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Wicked beats, sampled and altered and available freely for re-sampling, all based on the clicks, pops, and hisses from vinyl records’ end grooves.
According to my iTunes directory, you’re…
Radiohead.
For more than a decade, they’ve been a band on the cutting edge of music, or at least of music marketing.
So what do they do to give their new CD/LP/download product the splashy promotion they believe it deserves?
They come out with that most modern of media products.
A newspaper.
Specifically, a 12-page tabloid, handed out for free in select major cities, including this one. Online reports say copies went fast in many of these pass-out spots. (Last I heard, you could get one at Sonic Boom Records in Ballard, but only while supplies last.)
This sign of newsprint’s continued attention-grabbing viability comes two years and two weeks after the last print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Yes, I still mourn it.
I even dream about it. But I won’t get into that.
I will say I still believe there’s a P-I sized hole in the local media landscape. PubliCola, Seattle PostGlobe, Crosscut, and now SportsPress Northwest only fill pieces of that hole.
The SeattlePI.com website not only doesn’t fill its former parent journal’s role, it doesn’t even fill the role it could fill, as the go-to online local headline source.
It’s still designed like a newspaper’s web presence. The front page, and the second-tier directory pages, are each cluttered with 100 or more links, mostly to syndicated and wire pieces and to the contributions of unpaid bloggers. There’s no direct way to find the site’s own staff-written material (which remains remarkably good).
What’s worse, PI.com, as it’s currently structured, has little growth potential. It’s already generating as many “hits” as it did when it had a whole newspaper to give it content. It’s either just breaking even or is perpetually about to, according to which rumors you care to believe. There’s not much further revenue it can attract as a website with banner ads.
PI.com needs to find its next level.
With its current minimal staff, it likely couldn’t create a web app or a mobile app that could command a price from readers, a la Rupert Murdoch’s iPad “paper” The Daily or the newly paywalled NY Times site.
But it could repackage its current in-house content, plus the best of its bloggers’ contributions, into a free web app and/or mobile app.
This would make PI.com’s articles and essays better organized, easier to navigate and to read.
This would also offer advertisers with bigger, more productive ad spaces that would compliment, not clutter up, the reading experience.
Then of course, there’s always the possibility of moving the P-I back into print. Perhaps as a colorful freebie tabloid, one that could siphon off home and car ads from the SeaTimes and lifestyle ads from the slick regional monthlies.
Alternately, some of the local philanthropists who’d offered to take over the P-I from Hearst in 2009 could start their own paper, creating a new tradition.
…but somewhere on the first page of Flickr’s “Seattle Invitationals 2011 Pool” you can find a shot of me in my best oversize thrift store stage suit.
A few days late but always more than welcome, it’s the yummy return of the annual MISCmedia In/Out List.
As always, this listing denotes what will become hot or not-so-hot during the next year, not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you believe everything big now will just keep getting bigger, I can get you a Hummer dealership really cheap.
I’ve been recruited into singing at this year’s Seattle (Elvis) Invitationals. The annual impersonation (or “tribute artist”) competition takes place this Saturday evening, Jan. 8, at Club Motor, 1950 1st Ave. S.
It will be my first singing in a public, non-karaoke setting in at least a decade.
Unlike many of the Invitationals’ entrants, I’m no professional tribute artist. I don’t expect to win this thing. I’m just in it for the show-biz-ness of it all.
Be there if you dare.
The legendary musician-artist, who passed away last week, began his 1965-82 recording career by fusing two seemingly incompatible baby-boomer fads, beatnik “jazz poetry” and hippie “dirty blues.”
Somehow he made it work, through his own, firmly enforced, artistic vision.
What might have sounded like wild improvisations emphatically weren’t. Like his high-school buddy and sometime colleague Frank Zappa, Van Vliet was a control freak. He would riff out the melody lines for a whole album in a single day, then spend a year coming up with the elaborate arrangements, which he would painstakingly teach note-by-note to his sidemen.
He never sold many records, but was cited as an influence by countless later acts that sounded nothing like him, or like one another.
I got to meet him backstage after a 1981 Showbox concert. It was his 40th birthday. He wasn’t tremendously lucid. I promised his manager I wouldn’t print the interview.
A year later, he released his last album. He had another career, painting, where he felt he was treated better.
Coindicence, or…? dept.: Van Vliet died on the same day as Larry King’s last show. Both were associated, at different times, with legendary Hollywood agent-lawyer Herb Cohen.
MTV.com has, today, finally posted all of $5 Cover Seattle.
Local filmmaker Lynn Shelton completed the “webisode” music/drama series over a year ago. But the MTV bureaucrats sat on it ’til now.
If only Shelton had had someone in her life who could have warned her about working with this company.
Oh, wait….
Mayor McGinn found places at Seattle Center to put both a for-profit Chihuly glass-art gallery and a new home for KEXP.
The latter, which will include a live-performance studio with viewing windows, will be built out with no city funds. Expect even-longer pledge drives on the station starting next year.
The space will be in the Northwest Court buildings. That’s where the Vera Project is now and SIFF Cinema will be soon.
Of course, this means all of the Northwest Court’s rental spaces will be taken over by permanent tenants. Hence, they are no longer available for Bumbershoot’s visual and literary arts exhibits. This will result in these programs either getting diminished, or relocated to other Center spots. Let’s hope it’s the latter.
I was in the UW Daily newsroom that Monday night when the first bulletins came in on the already-archaic AP teletype machine, reporting first that John Lennon had been shot, then that he had died.
Within minutes, every radio station that even half-claimed to play rock music, and many that didn’t (in commercial radio, remember, this was the nadir of the soft rock era), went to all Lennon/Beatles and stayed that way for the next day or longer. I remember going up two flights of stairs in the Communications Building to the studios of KCMU (KEXP’s precursor), to hand deliver copies of the wire reports to the DJ on duty.
This was one month after the election of Ronald Reagan, the moment many of us campus libs feared would bring the beginning of the end of progress and democracy in America. (Turns out the only thing my more cynical/fearful lefties had wrong about that was how slow the nation’s fall from middle-class economic security would be.)
Then, with the assassination of the man who’d done as much as anyone to “invent” rock n’ roll as people my age had known it, it seemed to some of us like the end of the world.
But life, as Lennon himself had sung, went on.
As it will after all of us have left its stage.
ARI UP OF THE SLITS: Some of the first-generation punk rock women copied, mocked, or expanded on the then-traditional bad-boy rocker tropes. Ari Up, with her bandmates, did something different. They created a sound that was neither “fuck me” nor “fuck you.” It was totally rocking, totally strong, and totally feminine. And it’s seldom been matched.
BOB GUCCIONE: His masterwork, the first two decades of Penthouse magazine, was not merely a “more explicit” imitation of Playboy, as some commentators have described it. It had its own aesthetic, its own fully formed identity.
And so did its originator. If Playboy founder Hugh Hefner was more like William Randolph Hearst (a hermit philosopher secluded on his private estate), Guccione was more like Charles Foster Kane (living with gusto, building and losing a fortune). A Rolling Stone profile, published just before Guccione reluctantly gave up control of what was left of the Penthouse empire, depicts the open-shirted, gold-chain-bearing mogul as a man who poured millions into “life extension” research, even while he smoked the five packs of cigarettes a day that took much of his mouth in 1999 and his life last week.
TOM BOSLEY: Now we may never know what happened to Richie’s older brother.
(Cross-posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)
Sally Clark had seen the Capitol Hill Block Party.
She’d seen the exuberant crowds bringing life, and business, to Pike/Pine.
She saw that it was good.
She decided she’d like more of it.
All year round.
In July, even before this year’s Block Party occurred, the City Councilmember floated the idea of closing one or more blocks in the Pike/Pine Corridor from vehicular traffic, one or more nights a week.
Her inspiration came partly from the Block Party and partly from the example of Austin. The Texan nightlife hotspot, once billed in the ’90s as the “Next Seattle,” shuts down Sixth Street (its main nightclub drag) on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights from 11 p.m. to closing time. The result: A bustling, vibrant street scene along this part-time pedestrian mall.
Councilmember Clark’s first choice for a year-round block party site here was East Pike Street, from Broadway perhaps as far east as 12th Avenue.
The concept hasn’t progressed very far since it was initially offered. Councilmember Clark says it would need the approval of, and tax assessments from, area businesses.
Still, at this fledgling stage, the every-weekend block party has already attracted detractors.
Writing at PubliCola.net in mid-September, urban planning maven Dan Bertolet (who has described himself as a devout “car hater”) nevertheless disapproved of the street closure concept.
Bertolet believes a late night street party every weekend just couldn’t attract enough regular patrons to be worth the traffic disruptions.
He’d rather have a more modest set of pedestrian amenities on East Pike, such as wider sidewalks and a wider range of permitted foods for street vendors to sell.
I disagree.
I’ve seen the weekend night scene along First Avenue in Belltown (which will get its own quasi-Block Party space next year, when Bell Street gets refitted with wider, landscaped sidewalks).
The late-night scene on First can occasionally get wild and rowdy, particularly in the hour just before and after closing time. But it can also be a blast, an entertainment destination in its own right.
Something like that on The Hill, with its own unique milieu, would be its own kind of blast. Particularly if it’s enhanced by the freedom of milling about without fear of traffic.
Of course, Seattle has something Austin (and New Orleans and Miami) don’t have.
A rainy season, commonly known as winter.
Would The Hill’s party-minded young adults, hipsters, gays, etc. want to wander about on a closed-off street during a drizzling Northwest monsoon season?
For a potential answer to that, don’t look south. Look north.
A long stretch of Vancouver’s Granville Street has been car-free (except for transit buses) for three decades now.
And it works.
Day and night, week in and week out, Granville is alive with diners, drinkers, clubgoers, and assorted revelers of all types.
Pike can become more like that.
We could at least try it out.
Close East Pike to cars one Saturday night a month for six months.
Festoon the place with awnings and tents in case of rain.
Bring in artists, a music stage, street performers, fire eaters, and vaudeville/burlesque acts.
Park some mobile vending trucks. But leave out the beer garden. The object is to bring more business to Pike/Pine’s bars, not to compete with them.
If these trials work out, if they attract enough regular revelers, turn them into regular events.
I can see the slogan now:
“Yes, We’re Closed!”
Last night, I attended the highly anticipated premiere of I Am Secretly an Important Man, the long in-the-making biopic about Seattle poet/author/musician/actor/performance artist Steven J. “Jesse” Bernstein.
Documentarian Peter Sillen had been collecting footage and reminiscences of Bernstein since the year after Bernstein’s 1991 suicide. Only now, after directing four other films and performing camera work on several others, has Sillen finally assembled this footage into an 85-minute feature.
He’s done a spectacular job.
The finished work captures, as well as any mere 85-minute feature can, the immense creative range, depth, and contradictions within Bernstein, which I won’t attempt to describe in this one blog entry.
(Of course, it helps that Bernstein recorded so much of his life and work in audio tape, video tape, and film, much of it taken by artists and collaborators from across the Northwest creative community.)
Suffice it to say you should see An Important Man during its engagement later this autumn at the Northwest Film Forum.
