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Seattle loses a major community institution this week, quietly.
SCAN TV (Seattle Community Access Network), the nonprofit that’s operated the city’s public access cable channel for more than a decade, closes up shop. SCAN declined to bid on another contract to run the channel, after penny pinching city bureaucrats slashed the funding for its operation.
The Seattle Community College District’s SCCtv agreed to take over the channel at the vastly reduced funding level. The new iteration of the access channel, renamed Seattle Community Media, starts Friday. For the first few weeks, as SCM gets its technical infrastructure together, programming will be limited to rerun episodes of shows supplied by existing SCAN citizen producers.
With the change comes the closing of the access studio on N. 98th Street east of Aurora. Starting in 1983 (when Group W Cable opened it as a condition of its city cable contract), the Northwest Access and Production Center’s modest 30-by-40-foot main studio hosted an astounding array of artisanal TV. Citizens signed up for time slots, took training classes on the gear, and created all-volunteer productions, some quite elaborate.
That room was known as the “big studio.” There was also the “small studio,” a walk-in closet with one camera and a control console; producers strove to stretch that room’s capabilities, even producing musical variety shows (albeit starring very small combos).
SCM will reinstall the SCAN equipment on the North Seattle Community College campus, just a few blocks east of the old site. This means producers will still be able to make multi-camera, studio-based TV shows, as well as single camcorder, field-based video footage.
But nothing on the new SCM channel will be cablecast live.
That means (1) no call-in segments, and (2) no in-studio surprises. In-studio mistakes, yes, but no surprises.
•
At the access channel’s peak of popularity in the mid 1990s, a Seattle Times feature story described its panoply of programming.
There was music of every conceivable genre, including some of the earliest footage of Soundgarden and other future “Seattle scene” stars (and should-have-been stars).
There were ethnic cultural programs ranging from Chinese to Somali.
There were single-issue discussion and monologue shows advocating everything from gun rights to alternative medicine.
There were preachers of every theological stripe, including UFO religions and atheism.
There was the Rev. Bruce Howard, a music teacher who created (and successively re-created) his own spiritual discipline, evolving from fire and brimstone to (relatively) happy folk singing. (No, I don’t know whatever happened to him.)
There was Philip Craft’s Political Playhouse, in which the sometimes naked host offered up interviews and comedy skits expressing his flavor of radicalism (politicians = bad, marijuana = good). Craft later moved to L.A. and helped make a low budget film based on his experiences, Anarchy TV.
Another lefty political show, Deface the Nation, had a vegan cooking spinoff series called All You Can Stomach.
There was the drag queen cooking show Queen’s Kitchen and its sequel Love, Laverne (a live sitcom).
There were other home brewed comedy ventures such as Bend My Ear Seattle (with hosts Chardmo and Johnny 99 and house band Hot Dog Water), The Make Josh Famous Half-Hour of Garbage, and Gavin’s Hawse (with Gavin Guss, later of the neo-pop band Tube Top and now a solo singer-songwriter).
There was Richard Lee’s Kurt Cobain Was Murdered, in which the steadily crazier looking and sounding Lee reiterated, week after week for years, his specious conspiracy theories. Lee eventually ran for mayor in 2001, showing up at a debate with a beard and in a dress.
There was deadpan comic MC Spud Goodman, one of the two access stars who graduated to “real” TV, hosting bizarre skits and local bands for four years on channels 22 and 13.
There was the other later-made-it-big guy, serious public affairs interviewer C.R. Douglas, who took his insightful chats with local political leaders to the city-owned Seattle Channel (retiring earlier this year).
And there was the call-in show Bong Hit Championships (did what it said on the tin).
In 1999, the access channel had already begun to fade from public awareness. That’s when the city engineered the creation of SCAN, and put the new nonprofit group charge of the channel.
One reason was to remove Comcast AT&T (which, through mergers, wound up with most of Seattle’s cable subscriptions, which would soon after be sold to Comcast) from the responsibility to enforce limits on the channel’s “free speech” policies.
Producers were forbidden from airing commercials or soliciting money on the air. Otherwise, pretty much any content was permitted. Officially, programming wasn’t supposed to violate federal “obscenity” guidelines.
But with a no-prescreening policy in effect, some producers dared to sneak stuff past. Michael Aviaz’s Mike Hunt TV and T.J. Williamson’s Fulfilling Your Fantasies included uncensored excerpts from hardcore porn videos. Aviaz’s show ran off and on for nine years, getting kicked off for good in 2006. Williamson stopped submitting X-rated shows, but continued to program non-controversial travelogue videos under the name Adventure TV.
One of the ’90s access stars, monologuist-painter Shannon (Goddess Kring) Kringen, is still on the channel today (though no longer prancing naked on camera).
So are a trio of long-running musical shows, Music Inner City, D’Maurice & Armageddon, and Blues To Dos.
This week’s final SCAN schedule includes much the same range of fare the access channel had in its heyday, albeit without some of the edgier fare.
There’s even a madcap comedy-variety show, The VonHummer Hour.
It’s imported from Portland.
The ultimate question should not be, “How could the city defund SCAN?”
It should rather be, “Why was so little done to defend it?”
One reason: In a 200-channel cable TV landscape, this one little unadvertised analog channel lost what local prominence it had.
Another reason: With YouTube and podcasts and video blog posts, a scheduled cable channel is a relatively inconvenient way to distribute and view indie video. And the ol’ WWW in general is a handier way to disseminate niche-audience messages and entertainments (albeit a harder place to find them).
Still, there’s something very invigorating, even democratizing, about people making their own TV and making it available to the whole community to view in real time.
With the right support, SCM could bring that spirit back.
UPDATE: Seattle Community Media has now taken over the channel. The schedule of programs is the same as the final SCAN schedule. The only difference so far is the promos between programs. One of them is a sped-up video of a short drive from the old SCAN building to the NSCC campus, where a small staff stands in wait to proclaim “Welcome to Seattle Community Media.”
(Note: As was the case during my earlier flirtation with morning headlines circa 2007, these won’t necessarily appear every day.)
He says well-meaning things about whites stealing rock and roll from blacks — no mention of hip-hop though. Or what Clarence might have thought about playing to arenas and stadiums filled with next-to-zero black people. (Springsteen’s audience is pretty much exclusively white.) Or, for that matter, how Timothy felt standing in a room full of white people congratulating himself on America’s ability to successfully and peacefully integrate itself, due solely to the fact that there was a black guy in the band playing saxophone.
In case you haven’t noticed, there are some lovely cover-art images on this page’s lower left. They depict books, CDs, and DVDs with at least a vague connection to Seattle and proximity, all of which are for sale.
The selection changes at random every time you load or reload any page on this site. So if you don’t see something you like, you probably will the next time.
I just added more than 100 additional titles to the database, so there’s plenty of variety.
Of course, if you really want to help support these verbal endeavors, you should buy one of our own lovely MISCmedia products.
At least two more of those will be up for your perusal and purchase within the next few months. Stay tuned.
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.
