AS PART OF my ongoing efforts to find gainful (paying) employment, I recently made my first voice-over demo recording. You can hear it at this link in the ever-popular MP3 format. Send it to anyone you know who might be responsible for casting commercials, industrial videos, documentaries, video-game soundtracks, etc., and be sure to send them this web address at the same time.

…yet another blow, effectively killing off another great music sharing portal, Audiogalaxy.com. It was the best of its type, until the next one comes along. Which it will, despite the the forces of control.

IN SLIGHTLY HAPPIER NEWS, it’s increasingly apparent Arthur Andersen & Co. will pay the ultimate price for its past funny-money chicanery, and will essentially cease to exist except as a lawsuit-settlement entity. It’s time other companies faced similar disillusionments (not mere breakups). Clear Channel Communications is first on my list, followed by the major record labels. I’m sure you could think of others. Any suggestions?

• The new Frontier Room: Travesty or abomination?
• I tried to follow my bliss, until it filed a restraining order.
• It’s hard to believe sometimes, but people have been having sex since before you were born.
• Philip Morris sells Miller Beer to South African Breweries Ltd.: Since Miller owns Olympia Brewing (the Northwest’s last mass-market brewery), how will the radicaler-than-thou Olympia downtown scenesters react to their town’s biggest non-governmental institution becoming part of what used to be apartheid’s biggest profiteers? (I know they cared little about Philip Morris owning Oly; except for the straight-edgers, those Olympia scenesters smoke like factories.)
• Who doesn’t love the ever-evolving typography of movie title graphics? And who doesn’t think they were a lot cooler in the olden days of real showmanship?

DROPPING THE NEEDLE: Even before Barry Ackerley’s radio stations become part of the Clear Channel evil empire, they’re changing for the worse. One of them, which had briefly run a nice nonthreatening ’80s nostalgia format, has suddenly become “Quick 96,” playing only six- to ten-second sound bites from oldies songs, which are given credit only on the station’s web site. (The snippets are separated by an automated voice announcing three-digit numbers, which you must look up on the site.) My initial reaction: I’m reminded of the countdown-roundup snippets on MTV’s TRL, without the pictures of course. My second reaction: Is anybody actually expected to like this enough to listen even past one commercial break? My suspicion: This is likely intended as a short-term filler concept, until the sale to Clear Channel goes final, at which time it’ll adopt one of the chain’s satellite-fed network formats. When an earlier sale doomed an earlier operation on the same frequency, KYYX, the station ended with a week of nothing but an electronic voice counting down the seconds to sign-off–for an entire week.

UPDATE TO THE ABOVE: Sure enough, “Quick 96” turned out to be a publicity stunt. Forty-eight hours after the “innovative new station” debuted, back came the ’60s-’70s oldies library of The Beat’s immediate predecessor format, KJR-FM, played as full-length tunes; this format (conveniently using music tapes already on the station’s premises and requiring no additional new recordings) will presumably stick around until Clear Channel moves in.

The world has lost Spike Milligan, creator and last living costar of the BBC Radio Goon Show and pioneer of “zany” Brit comedy…

…and Arthur Lyman, one of the kings of Hawaiian pop music.

AFTER FAR TOO LONG, substantial changes have been made to this site’s two links pages, CyberStuff and Things I Like. Many dead links have been dropped or replaced; several new items have been added. Enjoy.

SCARY: Somebody’s writing threatening messages to Sonics players, and it’s not about the team’s mediocre home record this season.

SCARIER: The ugly truth about Clear Channel Communications, the octopus of U.S. radio that’s taking over KJR and KUBE.

…or what would at least make for interesting new stories:

• Boeing fires Phil Condit; cuts costs by closing the fancy new Chicago HQ, establishing a less top-heavy corporate structure, and installing a smaller main office back in Seattle.
• The new Seattle Seahawks football stadium is named after the largest consistently-profitable company still based here. At Costco Park, all soft drinks come only in 24-packs.
• Two National Hockey League teams in U.S. small markets go broke. One moves to Winnipeg, the other to the Tacoma Dome.
• Baseball commissioner Bud Selig gets “contracted.”
• New York Mayor Bloomberg is forced to resign amid worldwide public outcry over his plan to tear down Yankee Stadium.
• Inventor Dean Kamen shows off a working, affordable, two-seater solar car. Every Republican state governor in America vows to never allow the thing on the streets.
• The major record labels lobby for emergency “survival” legislation allowing them to retroactively cancel all artist royalties whilst setting up government subsidies for executives’ mansions and cocaine budgets.
• Clever rust-belt entrepreneurs form a joint company to buy up underused and/or abandoned factories and mills. Their clothes, shoes, DVD players, garden tools, and other products all carry the same patriotic-themed brand name (perhaps “AmeriMade”). Their ads’ message: If you’re not willing to pay more for an AmeriMade product, you’re a bin Laden sympathizer.
• Democrats retake the U.S. House of Representatives, despite endless rants emanating from Limbaugh, Fox News Channel, the Wall St. Journal, The McLaughlin Group, etc. that anyone who doesn’t vote a straight Republican ticket is a bin Laden sympathizer. The new Congressional leadership begins to openly ask whether permitting further broadcast-media consolidations would be unwise.
• The New Republic runs a lead editorial admitting it is no longer a “liberal” magazine, and hasn’t been since 1983.
• Amazon.com becomes “profitable” by spinning off all its slower-selling product lines (hardware, appliances, sporting goods, etc.) to co-branded joint ventures with traditional retailers. The hardware operation, f’rinstance, becomes “Jack’sHometownHardwareAndBaitShop.com, Powered by Amazon.”
• Osama bin Laden is found in November on a remote island just like a soap-opera villain, having had plastic surgery to look like a whole other person.
• A cheap, simple-to-manufacture AIDS treatment drug is announced. Unfortunately for Muslim African leaders, it turns out to be made from reprocessed pork semen.
• High definition (or at least medium-high definition) TVs finally become popular, chiefly for viewing DVDs.
• Politicians in slumping tourist states propose Nevada-style regulated brothels, sparking a rift between the corporate and moralistic branches of U.S. conservatism.
• Gangsta rap completes its disappearance from the music scene when its last major audience (white mall kids) collectively decides it would rather pretend to be Mexican.
• An NFL head coach admits reports that he’s gay.
• Somebody figures out how to turn a profit from a “content-based” website. But the formula’s still too labor-intensive, and the potential return too low, to interest any but the smallest mom-and-pop sites.
• A major retail chain is reorganized as a co-op of local store operators.

SOME BRITISH GUY mourns the age of the Polaroid camera, whose maker has filed for bankruptcy.

“Emperor” Lee Smith, 59, was Seattle’s premier top-40 AM disc jockey in the ’70s, just about the last time there were such things as top-to AM disc jockeys. He held the morning shift on KJR from 1969 to 1974, and aimed his show at the teens and preteens left behind by a “youth culture” industry more interested in following their older siblings. He spouted witty, energetic banter between the hits of the Spinners, Dolly Parton, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. He made public appearances (including annual “chariot races”) clad in a burgundy toga and gold sandals. He made his audience feel they had a DJ, nay a celebrity, of their very own. When he was transferred into the station’s sales department, his last on-air day featured a Watergate-themed comedy skit, “The Impeachment of an Emperor.” He died Oct. 12 from cancer.

Norm Gregory, one of Smith’s former KJR colleagues, said, “The first time I saw him was in 1967 and the last time was in 1995 and he was the same guy from that first day to the last. Emp was a wild and wacky radio personality, a great father, and a wonderful friend.”

More on Smith can be had at the KJR Memories site.

YR. HUMBLE EDITOR was recently awarded the honor of being one of the 18 jurors who selected the “MetropoList 150,” the Museum of History and Industry/Seattle Times list of the 150 most influential people in the 150-year history of Seattle and King County.

I’m quite satisfied with the final list, available at this link. There’s almost nobody on it I wouldn’t have wanted on it.

Nevertheless, there are several names I wrote in which didn’t make the final selection. In alphabetical order, they include:

• LYNDA BARRY: South Seattle native and acclaimed cartoonist and author. Her novel Cruddy was set in a fictionalized Rainier Valley.
• STEVEN J. “JESSE” BERNSTEIN: Poet and short-story writer of urban decay and dystopian fantasy.
• TED BUNDY: Clean-cut law student and serial killer.
• DYAN CANNON: West Seattle native who became a movie sex symbol at age 32.
• RAY CHARLES: R&B legend whose career started in Seattle’s old Jackson Street jazz scene.
• FRANCES FARMER: West Seattle-born actress with an ill-fated Hollywood career.
• CHET HUNTLEY: UW grad and pioneering network TV news anchorman.
• MARY KAY LETOURNEAU: Middle-school teacher who bore two children by a student, causing much public hand-wringing and analysis.
• MIKE LUKOVICH: Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and UW Daily grad.
• FLOYD SCHMOE (1895-2000): Seattle Quaker leader, mountaineer, and tireless peace activist.
• LESTER SMITH & DANNY KAYE: Seattle businessman Smith, first on his own and later in partnership with movie star Kaye, ran a string of radio stations (including KJR); they also were the Mariners’ original owners.
• DEWEY SORIANO: Was awarded ownership of the 1969 Seattle baseball franchise on the basis of his skill in managing the Pacific Coast League. He didn’t have the financial resources to keep the Pilots going, and the team was sold and moved to Milwaukee after one season.
• ICHIRO SUZUKI: Mariners sensation; first Japanese-born “position player” (non-pitcher) in the U.S. Major Leagues.
• EDDIE VEDDER: Singer for the rock band Pearl Jam. The group’s dispute with TicketMaster in 1993 presaged many later disputes by artists and fans against the bigtime music industry.
• ANN & NANCY WILSON: Leaders since 1973 of Heart, the first Seattle rock band to attain international prominence. Proved you could be all woman AND all rock.
• TOBIAS WOLFF: Acclaimed author and memoirist (This Boy’s Life).

IN ADDITION, here are some names nominated by other people (with the descriptions these anonymous nominators wrote) for whom I voted, but who also failed to make the final cut:

• DICK BALCH: Local Chevrolet dealer and irreverent pitchman for cars (smashed cars with sledgehammer on TV ads).
• OLE BARDAHL: Proprietor of Bardahl, the Ballard-based engine additive company known for its hydroplanes (the Miss. Bardahl) and its giant neon sign.
• SIR THOMAS BEECHAM: A renowned English conductor, Beecham became the director of the tiny Seattle Symphony in 1941. He is remembered most for his quote, “If I were a member of this community, really I should get weary of being looked on as a sort of aesthetic dust-bin.”
• PETER BEVIS: Founder and director of the Fremont School of Fine Arts and the Fremont Foundry, established in 1986. An artist who makes molds of road kill, Bevis’s work illustrates the recklessness of people in nature. He bought the Kalakala back to Seattle.
• BOB BLACKBURN: Longtime voice of the Seattle Supersonics, from their first season in 1967 until the early 1990s.
• BOBO THE GORILLA: Bobo introduced Seattleites to the great apes and to “exotic” wildlife in general; he taught a whole generation to abandon diabolical “King Kong” images of gorillas. He inspired better zoo husbandry and perhaps paved the way for primate preservation attempts. In his current taxidermied form, his legacy lives on.
• STAN BORESON: Scandinavian musician, comedian, and host of the long-running children’s program KING Clubhouse.
• BERKLEY BREATHED: Cartoonist, Bloom Country.
• FRED BROWN: The former Sonic star, who help lead them to their only title in 1979, influenced a generation of ballplayers locally and nationally through his long-distance gunning which inspired the term “From downtown…” now heard in broadcasts everywhere, but is as Seattle–and omnipresent–as “Skid Road.”
• HIRAM CHITTENDEN: An officer in the Army Corps of Engineers and one of Seattle’s first port commissioners, Chittenden worked to develop the Port of Seattle. He oversaw the construction of the Lake Washington Canal and locks, which now bear his name.
• JOHN CONSIDINE: Considine’s “People’s Theater” was a Seattle success, which led to his preeminent career as an impresario. He helped pioneer early Edison films and established the famous vaudeville circuit. Considine and his brother Tom were involved in the notorious killing of Seattle’s police chief, William L. Meredith.
• LLOYD COONEY: Former KIRO-TV station manager and editorial commentator.
• D.B. COOPER: Infamous airline hijacker (flight from Portland to Seattle) who may or may not have gotten away.
• JACK ENDINO: Recording engineer/producer who made early studio recordings of Nirvana, Soundgarden, the U-Men and other proto-grunge acts.
• JEAN ENERSEN: Television news anchor for KING-TV.
• RANDY FINLEY: Founder of the Seven Gables Theatre chain, which, along with the Seattle International Film Festival, fostered and bolstered Seattle’s appetite for fine cinema.
• CHARLES FRYE: Frye was a partner in Frye and Bruhn, Meatpackers. He founded the Frye Museum atop Seattle’s First Hill, an institution that is one of Seattle’s leading museums today.
• BOB HARDWICK: KVI disc jockey in the 1960s and 1970s, known for wacky on-air antics.
• DENIS HAYS: Director of the Bullitt Foundation; created Earth Day in 1970.
• SAM ISRAEL: A hermit who lived in Eastern Washington, amassed over 500 properties, worth between $100-$200 million at the time of his death (1994). He owned over 30 downtown properties, 14 of which were located in Pioneer Square. Due to his negligence many of his properties were vacated and fell into disrepair. However, the low rent helped spawn a lively artists’ scene in Pioneer Square.
• QUINCY JONES: Garfield High School’s musical prodigy has more Grammy nominations than anyone else in history. Jones has written film scores, sonatas, and popular music, done arrangements for other artists and performed throughout the world with his own band and orchestra.
• RICK “PEANUT MAN” KAMINSKI: If you attended an event at the Kingdome from the 1970s to the 1990s, you saw Kaminski throwing bags of peanuts to his customers, along with a tennis ball sliced open enough for the patron to place his money inside for the return toss.
• JOHN KEISTER: The quintessential bittersweet Seattleite who remembers how it used to be before so many people moved here, Keister used his position as host of KING -TV’s Almost Live! weekly comedy program to poke fun at Kent, Bellevue, Ballard and other Seattle suburbs and neighborhoods.
• NORM LANGILL: Founder of One Reel, producer of Bumbershoot and other cultural events.
• GARY LARSON: creator of The Far Side, a hugely popular cartoon panel. Prior to Larson’s retirement in 1995, the cartoon strip appeared in 1,900 daily newspapers in 40 countries, and was translated into 17 languages.
• GYPSY ROSE LEE: West Seattle’s Lee, with her sister June Havoc, performed in a kiddy vaudeville act that toured the nation. She parlayed her experience into a famous striptease that was a hit at the Zeigfeld Follies. Her life was portrayed in the musical Gypsy.
• LOGGERS: When white men first came to the Seattle area travel was long and difficult between Seattle and Tacoma. With the arrival of the loggers travel became significantly easier.
• DARRLY MACDONALD: Co-founder of the Seattle International Film Festival and purveyor of Seattle’s now firmly-established reputation as a city of cinematic connoisseurs.
• HELENE MADISON: When 19-year-old Madison returned to Seattle with three gold medals in swimming from the 1932 Olympic games, the city raised a celebration, including a ticker tape parade. Two pools in Seattle are named after Madison.
• VIC MEYERS: Seattle jazz-band leader who ran for mayor in 1930 on the whim of some practical jokesters at the Seattle Times. He was eager to lend himself to the joke, and Times reporters wrote him up throughout the “campaign.” After losing the election, he won the election for the lieutenant governor of the state.
• LORENZO MILAM: Founder of KRAB radio in 1962. KRAB was among the earliest community radio stations in the country. It was one of the voices and centers of the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s.
• SIR MIX-A-LOT (Anthony Ray): Seattle’s first national rap star, who hit it big with his “Posse on Broadway” single.
• DAVE NIEHAUS: He has been delivering colorful descriptions of Mariner baseball since the team was established in 1977. His enormous contribution to Mariner baseball was recognized when he was asked to throw out the ceremonial first pitch in the inaugural game in Safeco Field.
• MARNI NIXON: Broadway singer. Among her famous roles was singing for Audrey Hepburn in [the film version of] My Fair Lady.
• BILL NYE: Seattle star (and former Almost Live! character) on PBS’s Bill Nye The Science Guy, seen by millions of kids nationwide.
• PAT O’DAY: High profile disc jockey on KJR radio through the ’60s. The first disc jockey in Seattle to really start playing rock ‘n roll, an action for which he earned 37 percent of the radio audience.
• JOHN OKADA (1923-1971): Author of No-No Boy, winner of the National Book Award, a novel that explores the return home to Seattle of an interned Nisei Japanese, who refused to forswear allegiance to the emperor of Japan and to fight in uniform for the United States when those questions were posed in the internment camp.
• JIM OWENS: UW football coach. Took team to three Rose Bowls
• MARTIN PANG: Started the 1995 fire in the Mary Pang qarehouse downtown. Four firemen died while subduing the blaze. In his confession, Pang said he started the fire to relieve his parents the burden of running the facility.
• BRUCE PAVITT & JONATHAN PONEMAN: Co-founders of Sub Pop, Seattle record label that originally signed Nirvana, Soundgarden and other grunge acts.
• ANGELO PELLEGRINI: Italian immigrant who settled with his family in Southwest Washington; made his mark as a UW English professor and food and wine expert. He wrote many books and gave talks on Italian culture.
• GEORGE POCOCK: Designer and builder of racing shells, including those used by 1936 gold medal US Olympic Team. Also designed the hull of Boeing’s first commercial plane.
• THE PROSTITUTES OF THE 1800s: The main reason many men originally came to the Seattle area.
• DIXY LEE RAY: Washington’s first female governor. The idiosyncratic Ray was at the helm when Mt. St. Helens erupted.
• LARRY REID: Early director of COCA (Center on Contemporary Art).
• ROSIE THE RIVETER: Popular symbol during WWII of women entering the blue-collar work force in order to keep up industrial production to support the war effort; believed to be based on women in Boeing’s work force.
• BILL “THE BEERMAN” SCOTT: Kingdome concession employee who became the defacto yell king for the Mariners, Sonics, Sounders and Seahawks (when all played under the same concrete roof).
• RUBEN SIERRA: Founder of the “multi-cultural-before-its-time” Group Theatre.
• JEFF SMITH (FRUGAL GOURMET): Author and chef who popularized good cooking for a mass audience.
• DICK SPADY: Founder, with two partners, of Dick’s Drive In, which opened in Wallingford in 1954.
• ELBRIDGE A. STUART: Created the Carnation Co., which initially focused on evaporated milk. Stuart developed a dairy farm near Tolt, which was renamed Carnation. In 1926 Carnation entered the fresh milk and ice cream business. The firm [now merged into Nestle] was known for its slogan “Milk from Contented Cows.”
• CONRAD UNO: Egg Studios owner/producer who recorded and/or released records by up and coming Seattle acts in the 1980s and 1990s, including the Young Fresh Fellows, Posies, and Presidents of the United States of America.
• GORDON VICKERY: Driving force in getting Medic One in the Fire Department. Many thousands of lives have been saved because of this.
• BURKE WALKER: Founder of the Empty Space Theatre.
• BOB WALSH: Seattle entrepreneur behind the Goodwill Games (1990) and attempts to bring the Olympic Games to Seattle.
• ROB WELLER: Former UW Husky yell king and Entertainment Tonight host credited with creation of the circular, undulating group cheer known as “The Wave.”
• BILL YEEND: Longtime host (25 years) of KIRO radio’s number-one rated morning news program.
• MARION ANTHONY ZIONCHECK: Born in Austria, Zioncheck attended the UW. After passing the state bar exam he won a seat in Congress. His mental deterioration and suicide (leaping from the Arctic Building in Seattle) were national stories.

(This article’s permanent link.)

…HE’S GOING DEAF: Since I don’t share his brand of insult “humor,” I won’t make the kind of obvious put-down gag that he would surely have made if a Clinton administration official had faced the same personal tragedy. I will say that the news contradicts the longstanding folkloric equivalence of deafness with saintliness and humility.

…our online of top Northwest power pop past and present, has been assigned a new URL by our server provider. This means those of you who’ve bookmarked it in WinAmp, iTunes, or other MP3-playing software will need to paste in the new address, http://www.live365.com/play/73998.

What little creative spirit left in Seattle commercial radio is likely to get washed away. Longtime local station boss (and former Sonics owner) Barry Ackerley is retiring from the broadcasting biz and selling all his remaining properties (including KUBE-FM and KJR-AM) to Clear Channel Communications, the current 1200-lb. gorilla of U.S. media.

We first wrote about Clear Channel when it bought and promptly killed our second-favorite online radio station, Luxuria Music. That was the least of its crimes against culture. Thanks to government “regulators” allowing nearly unlimited industry consolidation, CC’s acquired over 1,100 stations. It runs them on the cheap: Firing local DJs, running centralized and automated playlists, bullying any remaining local competitors into cutting ad rates beneath break-even levels.

With this enormous airplay clout, CC’s become mighty pushy toward record companies. While it’s still legally prohibited from directly charging the labels to play their records, it manages to force other “considerations” from them.

Especially now that CC also owns one of North America’s two main concert promotion companies. It bought SFX Entertainment, of which The Stranger said in 1998 that “they could crush TicketMaster like a little bug.” As part of CC, it’s gotten even bigger and pushier, adding ticket surcharges and cutting artists’ fees. Many cloutless acts are even expected to perform for free at shows charging $25 or more per ticket, in exchange for airplay consideration on CC’s stations.

Clear Channel can easily be called the Microsoft of music and broadcasting. This is not a favorable comparison. Its strategies are clearly not competitive but monopolistic. It operates not to directly make money (indeed, it’s fiscal performance is at least as sorry as that of any media company in this ad-slump year) but to maintain and expand its power. And no politician has spoken out against it, not even the ones who love to bash the media. (Did I mention that Rush Limbaugh is now a CC employee?)

Seattle was the last big U.S. city not to have a CC-owned block of stations. Now our radio will likely suck as much as the radio everywhere else.

(This article’s permanent link.)

LAST TIME, we ran some short reviews of sites various people (usually their own operators) have asked me to plug.

Today, one more.

The day we ran a piece about the demise and (possible) resurrection of the great Net-radio station Luxuria Music, Simone Seikaly wrote to suggest checking out the outfit for which she works, TheDial:

“We are an entertainment company (based in Seattle) which creates timely and topical news/parody/comedy every day, and you can hear what we create interpersed between music in any one of our 20 music formats. Or, you can forego music and just listen to fresh content in our daily show, The Daily Dial, hosted by Brian Gregory.”

I wanted so much to be able to recommend TheDial’s audio streams. Not only is it a local outfit, but it employs some nice people. The aforementioned Gregory is not only a local radio vet, but the son of a longtime MISCmedia print-mag subscriber. Company programming VP Matt Bruno is a great power pop singer-songwriter.

And, unlike the currently dormant Luxuria, TheDial has a business plan, albeit an anything-for-a-buck business plan. Its site’s chock full of offers selling commercials, corporate custom-audio streams, and “investment opportunities.”

My problem with TheDial, though, lies at the heart of its programming concept. It’s a company led by folk from modern radio management, and run strictly according to the principles of modern radio–principles which, in my humble opinion, suck.

The comedy segments are loud, ultra-aggressive, overflowing with capital-A Attitude, and almost stupefyingly unfunny. They’re streamed on all 20 music formats, which means listeners to (f’r instance) the “Women in Rock” channel are apparently expected to guffaw out loud over such bits as “Showdown at the D-Cup Corral” (in which a male narrator describes a fight to the death between Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, using instantly-inflatable bosoms as weapons).

The music streams, from all I’ve been able to hear of them, are strictly defined, built around only their genre’s biggest (i.e., most overplayed) hits, and crafted not for artistic effect but for the accumulation of desirable demographics. It’s the sort of programming philosophy in which “Alternative” is just another formula genre.

I want online radio to be an alternative to the corporate stupidity of today’s commercial broadcast stations, not just an extension of it. And I continue to believe it can become that. Luxuria (despite its fiscal shortcomings and its demise at the hands of Clear Channel, the biggest and stupidest radio chain of them all) proved a great online station could be made by treating one’s listeners with intelligence and respect.

Most all the people I’ve met who’ve worked at stupid radio stations were personally capable of much better and more creative work than their bosses permitted. I’m sure the same’s true of TheDial’s personnel.

Here’s hoping they can move beyond the straitjacket of their current structure and get the chance to really prove themselves.

NEXT: Saving the light-rail plan from its planners.

ELSEWHERE:

• Another viewpoint on Luxuria Music’s fate….

MY FAVORITE NET RADIO STATION (other than my own B>MISCmedia Radio, of course) is dying this weekend. Or maybe not.

If the planned reincarnation of Luxuria Music as a pay site works out, it could be a catalyst toward finally establishing a viable business plan for Web-based content.

If it flops, a grand experiment in devising a radio station specifically for online listening (as opposed to the mere web-streaming of existing broadcast stations) will become just another memory of the dot-com crash.

Luxuria (named for a Roman goddess of lust) started up in LA a little over a year ago.(Yes, somethinig from LA that I actually like.) Its core staff included The Millionaire, cofounder of the once-smashing “cocktail nation” revival band Combustible Edison.

As you might guess from his involvement, its playlist was heavy on exotica, lounge, soft-surf, orchestral-pop instrumentals, and torch tunes.

But the station went further out from its core format-niche than most broadcast commercial stations nowadays. Any given hour might find it playing spy-movie themes, the poppier side of techno (cf. Pizzicato Five), rockabilly, French cabaret tunes, serious bebop jazz, odd early synth covers of Beatles hits, and awful Bill Cosby anti-drug children’s songs.

During most parts of the day, this music was curated and mixed by live DJs, who communicated with listeners via a chat room and a studio webcam. Some of these, such as Eric Bonerz (son of the Bob Newhart Show dentist) and performance artist Val Myers, turned their shifts into bizarre sketch-comedy schticks that also had music. Others produced long interviews (with musical highlights) of legends musical and otherwise, ranging from Beach Boy/tortured genius Brian Wilson to Tony the Tiger voice Thurl Ravenscroft.

But in the profitability-challenged web content industry, quality wasn’t enough. The station’s financial backer, a company developing turnkey technologies for Net radio, sold all its assets (including Luxuria) to Clear Channel Communications, one of the three or four mega-giants that have been consolidating and ruining broadcast radio all over America (Clear Channel alone owns some 1,200 stations!).

Clear Channel wanted to apply this company’s technologies toward the streaming versions of its broadcast properties (streams that are now offline, as part of a dispute with announcers’ unions). Clear Channel had no interest in maintaining Net-only stations like Luxuria, and announced in early April that it was shutting down the station as of April 30.

Luxuria’s been in death-watch mode ever since.

As DJs left or got laid off one by one, their time slots were taken over by an automated playlist system (nicknamed Luxotron 5000). In the site’s chat room and message boards, listeners and station personnel openly discussed how Luxuria might be saved, at a time when available investment capital for web content is essentially nil.

Finally, this week some of the station’s remaining live DJs hinted that, starting next Tuesday, you’ll be able to continue hearing those lush Lux sounds after all–if you cough up a $10-per-month subscription. They announced an email address where you could request further details as they become available.

I dunno if a subscription scheme will work for Lux. Such schemes haven’t worked on the web yet, except of course for porn, sports-betting info, and stock-market-betting info. And $10 a month (some cable systems charge less than that for HBO) might be a little steep.

But I hope it works, or leads to another plan that works.

For those not yet ready to shell out for Lux’s lush and luscious sounds, there are alternatives for the adventurous listener. One of the best is Seattle-based Antenna Internet Radio and its Friendly Persuasion show, an hour or two (always up, replaced weekly with new episodes) of oddities and delights from the editors of Cool and Strange Music magazine. Another is Swank Radio, an automated stream of ’50s orchestral pop (mostly instrumentals).

NEXT: A partial defense of fast food.

ELSEWHERE:

• A facetious list of big moneymaking ideas for the tech recession….

WHEN I FIRST READ that my beloved KCMU radio was being effectively taken over by Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project people, moved off of the UW campus, and renamed KEXP, I half-thought the announcement had to be an April Fool’s prank–even though I’d heard and read rumors about such a move for over a year, ever since the station won its hard-fought operating independence from KUOW, the UW’s money- and demographics-obsessed NPR station.

It just couldn’t be happening. Not really.

Like many loyal listeners to one of America’s finest “college radio” (whatever that means anymore) stations, I’ve invested a lot of time and memories in KCMU.

But I’ve also got a degree of pseudo-proprietary interest in it, having been one of the first new-music DJs on the station in 1980-81 (when it ceased to be a UW student-lab operation and became the valuable community resource it’s been all these years).

As I aged from nerdy college-radio new waver into dorky near-middle-aged progressive-pop fan, the station followed my (and my peer group’s) aging. It laid off from much of the hard-punk material (alas) and inserted a whole variety of fun and/or progressive genres all mixed up (yay!).

But KUOW management gradually asserted more control over KCMU in the early ’90s (at the height of the Seattle Music Scene hype KCMU had helped jump-start). I joined in with the C.U.R.S.E. (“Censorship Undermines Radio Station Ethics”) gang that had launched a boycott, eventually forcing management to back down on its programming-gentrification plans (although the station’s top-notch progressive-news programming remained excised, and today exists only in a Sunday-morning timeslot ghetto.)

This past year KCMU’s been about the best it’s been. The now full-time staff has got the “variety format” down pat, relentlessly mixing everything from power pop and emocore to delta blues and Italian soundtrack tunes.

So when the Big Change got closer, and more likely to be oh-so real, I almost feared setting my clock radio for Monday morning.

As it turned out, nothing seemed to have audibly changed. Yet.

But diligence is necessary.

We don’t want Allen’s minions turning KCMU (I still can’t type “KEXP” without trepidation, let alone say it) into some bland boomer-nostalgia station, or (almost as bad) the type of defanged, Paul-Simonized station the KUOW guys already tried to turn it into.

P.S.: If any of you have tapes of any of the now no-longer-to-be-heard KCMU promo spots, I’d love a copy.)

NEXT: Mulling more possible changes to the site. (I know, again….)

IN OTHER NEWS: It’s darned hard to think of Frisco Net-boors as folk needing or deserving our “support,” as postulated by the organizers of today’s “Back the Net Day.”

ELSEWHERE:

• A Forbes conspiracy theorist ponders whether the Net-content business crash was the work of a Microsoft “war of attrition” (found by Camworld)….
• …while the NY Times notes a number of Seattleites who like the tech-biz slowdown…

FOR NEARLY A CENTURY NOW (actually longer if you consider the touring vaudeville circuits), the entertainment industry has been at the forefront of the drive to turn this mongrel assortment of conquered natives, ex-slaves, and immigrants from all over into One America.

A people of one language (American English), one cuisine (bland), one apparel style (the toned-down Sears knockoffs of the previous year’s couture), one politick (the narrow oscillation between “liberal” big-money stooges and “conservative” big-money stooges), and most especially one culture.

A culture defined by Top 40 music, Top 10 radio (and later television) shows, Republican newspapers, best-seller books, marketable celebrities, and especially by the movies.

As the other major media began to splinter into niches and sub-niches (secondary and tertiary cable channels, hate-talk and shock-talk radio, alterna-weeklies and local business papers, and this whole Web thang), the movie industry has held steadfast in its drive to mold and hold a single unified audience.

Every woman’s supposed to weep for Julia Roberts’s love life. Every man’s supposed to cheer at Schwarzenegger’s gunslining. Every child’s supposed to gaze in wonder at the Lion King’s antics. Not just across this continent but globally.

(The few established niche genres within the movie world (“indie” hip-violence fests, foreign “art” films, direct-to-video horror and porn) are exceptions that prove the rule.)

So it’s a small surprise to read from a card-carrying Hollywood-insider hype artist, longtime Variety editor Peter Bart, acknowledge recently that there’s no single American mass populace anymore.

The cause of Bart’s revelation? Not the changes within the non-movie entertainment milieu, but the Presidential election fiasco. The two big parties had so effectively thrusted and parried their target-marketing efforts that, by the time the statistical-dead-heat results came in, they’d forged equally-sized constituencies, each with strengths in different demographic sectors.

Bart fails to realize these political coalitions are at least partly group marriages of convenience. Many Bush voters aren’t really censor-loving, art-hating hix from the stix; just as many Gore voters aren’t really free-trade-loving, hiphop-hating corporate mandarins.

A better explanation of the U.S. political divide comes from the British Prospect magazine, by a writer who asserts that, even after all these years, the socio-cultural-political divide in America remains north-vs.-south. In his view the Democrats, once the party of Southern racists and Northern Irish Catholics, are now the party of “good government” New Englanders and sanctimonious whitebread Northwesterners. The Republicans, once the party of Wall Street princes and Illinois farmers, are now the party of good-old-boy Texas oil hustlers and sex-loathing South Carolina reactionaries.

(The essay’s writer says he doesn’t know how to classify the West, but I do: Us Nor’westers are Northerners first and Westerners second; while Calif. is run by a Southern doublefaced aesthetic of public moralism and private crony-corruption.)

But even these classifications are overly broad. They always have been, but are even more oversimplistic nowadays.

The American scene isn’t breaking down into two cultures, but dozens, even hundreds. The politicians know this, and are scrambling to keep their coalitions together. The movie business, apparently, doesn’t know this. Yet.

TOMORROW: Micosoft? Discriminatory? How can one think such a thing?

ELSEWHERE:

• A tribute to the roadside art of Chicago….