• Not really a Seattle Times Shrinkage Watch update, but related: The Times website has posted the entire 152-page commemorative special section originally published at the Seattle World’s Fair’s opening weekend, 50 years ago this April. (And remember, newspaper pages were a lot wider back then.) All those puff-piece articles. All those now ‘retro’ photos and art. And all those ads! From supermarket chains down to commercial construction firms that didn’t need mass-market ads. Everyone wanted to advertise in newspapers then.
• No, Amazon is not some giant ogre out to stomp on all things truly bookish, say a few truly bookish folks.
• Rap n’ Opera, together at last. At least in this story.
• Last week’s #1 TV show in the Seattle area: the Grammys. #2: Downton Abbey. Really.
• Are we two years away from no longer being able to see films distributed on, you know, film?

tinyprints.com

• We may hear today (Thu 2/16) from the ex-Seattle financier who wants to build a new basketball/hockey arena and move an existing NBA team to it. No word from that other guy who allegedly wants to move an NHL team here.
• Dystopian novelist Gary Shteyngart went to Seattle for a travel mag. The resulting piece is super sad, in parts. But he also describes Seattle and Portland as…

…the last places in America where books are still a dominant part of the culture, consumed, discussed, pondered, and critiqued with gusto.

• Amazon reportedly still wants more Seattle office space.
• Liquor privatization starts phasing in on March 1, when restaurants and bars can buy booze direct from producers and out-of-state distributors.
• That $340 million state budget “windfall”? A lot of it’s due to past slashings of social service programs.
• The state Legislature still doesn’t have a plan to halt horrendous budget cuts. But it is working to bring back incentives for out-of-state film productions.
• It’s the end of the smelting line for the Fremont Fine Arts Foundry. The longtime site of statue-making, and home base of the first efforts to save the ferry Kalakala is going to become a restaurant, a bar, and a restaurant-bar supply house.
• Forget about radio, the printing press, penicillin, the wheel, or even gum with flavor crystals. The Internet is “the greatest thing that mankind has ever created.” Or so says the don of crazy cat captions.
• Is Microsoft helping fund a creepy right-wing campaign to force “climate change is just a theory” curricula in K-12 schools?
• In reality, as opposed to right-wing-media fantasyland, there is no war on religion in this country. And wrestling is fake too.
• Sean Hannity held a panel discussion about the birth control pseudo-controversy. The panel included men of several races and religions, and not even one woman. (Has even one woman spoken for the anti-birth-control side in any public forum, other than Sarah Palin?)
• Nancy Grace has become, if it can be imagined, even sleazier.
• Lest We Forget Dept.: It’s the 70th anniversary of the forced detention of Americans of Japanese descent.
• One anniversary not commemorated by many, except by Noam Chomsky: The 50th anniversary of the start of the Vietnam War. (Or rather, of U.S. involvement in same.)

fdin.org.uk

• Did you know Heinz had a soup factory in Kent? Emphasis on the “had.”
• Just when you thought you’d seen everything, something unexpected comes. Today’s edition: A poet who’s actually got people listening to him. Meet the Tacoma guy behind the viral video “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus.”
• A Facebook ad said an Issaquah heavy-metal guitarist with the stage name Steve Thunderbolt was looking for bandmates, but insisted on “no blacks”. Not ’cause he was a racist or anything; it was just “a drug issue and a safety issue.”
• It’s not just Ron Paul. The national Republican Party as a whole seems to just luuuuuv them some white supremacists.
• The UW president, the state’s highest paid employee, claims finding answers to education funding in Wash. state is “above my pay grade.”
• Soul divas aren’t supposed to die this young.
• Let’s hear it for last week’s #1 selling musical star on Amazon’s CD and download charts: Leonard Cohen! (Really.)
• Let’s close, just for the heckuvit, with Mike Wallace in a shortening commercial.

• Graphic designer Ben Crick is in the process of creating a manifesto for designers in the 21st century, to be communicated in the form of handsome posters. Crick’s name for the project: “I Am Designer.” He doesn’t have the URL for that yet, but he’s got the posters. The third poster happens to incorporate the logos of ATV and ITC, Sir Lew Grade’s TV production companies (The Saint, The Prisoner, Thunderbirds, The Muppet Show). The first poster, though, is the one whose message I identify with:

Don’t work for free under the guise of ‘good exposure’. It is bad exposure. If you don’t value your own work, neither will anyone else.

• It’s 10th Anniversary day today (Wednesday 2/8) at Top Pot Doughnuts. You know what that means: Free Old Fashioneds!
• As I’d previously predicted, the New York design firm contracted to design a new Seattle Waterfront has come up with a set of pretentious, windswept plazas and promenades, intended more to scream world-class-osity than to provide recreation and convenience for, you know, the people who actually live here. As I’ve said before, I don’t want a waterfront in good taste. I want a waterfront that tastes good.
• A Republican in the Oregon State Senate proposed a bill that would criminalize online invitations (even Tweets®) to events where crimes were later committed. As Goldy points out, it would essentially outlaw online organizing, under the guise of cracking down on “aggravated solitication.” The bill’s DOA in the Dem-controlled Ore. Senate, but it’s still damn close to what authorities in Egypt or Syria would like to stop.

entertainment weekly via getty images

Our ol’ pal, Posies singer-songwriter Ken Stringfellow, is quoted at the East Portland Blog as saying the Madonna/M.I.A. halftime show at Super Bowl LSMFT was all OK but doesn’t really signify “empowering women.”

That sort of “feminist victory,” Stringfellow claims, will only occur when “50 percent of the media companies are owned by women.”

“Ownership,” of course, is a slippery thing with NYSE- and NASDAQ-listed companies.

Such companies could easily be more than 50 percent “owned” by women. Overall, a sizable majority of all corporate stock shares officially are.

But this “ownership” is often filtered through pension systems, trusts, mutual funds, broker-managed accounts, and other schemes that don’t infer practical control.

Of the major media companies operating in the U.S. today, only a few have any significant degree of individual or family ownership. Among them:

• Viacom (Paramount, et al.) and CBS, now separately managed but both controlled by movie-theater mogul Sumner Redstone and family;
• Warner Music Group, now controlled by Russian-born chemical titan Len Blavatnik;
• Hearst Corp. (Cosmopolitan, A&E, et al.), wholly owned by that family’s fourth- and fifth-generation members;
• Advance Publications (The New Yorker, The Oregonian, Puget Sound Business Journal, et al.), owned by the S.I. Newhouse family;
• and, of course, News Corp. (Fox, et al.), controlled by the Rupert Murdoch clan.

Redstone’s and Murdoch’s daughters have taken major roles within their respective aging dads’ companies, and may take greater roles in the future.

But they’ve shown every sign of supporting regular showbiz-content gender roles, including the roles Stringfellow derides as “T&A” and “soft porn.”

I, and I suspect many of you, wouldn’t count that as a “feminist victory.”

treasurenet.com

• Remember, folks: “Rural estates” are not farmland. (And in my mind, vineyards only technically count.)
• Rumblings about a new SoDo basketball/hockey area heat up with revelations of high-level discussions between would-be developers/team owners and city bigwigs. The object: a development deal that wouldn’t need the city funds it legally can’t get. Also, the NBA’s Sacramento Kings could be moved, as early as next season.
• A tangible, physical Amazon store in Seattle? Believe it when you see it.
• A Seattle (and specifically Capitol Hill) institution, Phil Smart Mercedes-Benz, is being sold. The new owners plan to consolidate operations at the dealership’s newish Airport Way site, abandoning the East Pike Street HQ it’s held all these past 52 years. The Smart family will continue to own that property, one of the last remnants of the old Pike/Pine Auto Row.
• The Capitol Hill Times, a neighborhood paper for which I worked, off and on, in mostly part-time capacities between 1984 and 2011, has been sold to a foreclosure-services entrepreneur. His apparent business model for the paper is as a forum for legal notices, including his own.
• A tiny piece of the old Washington Mutual is left standing. It’s a mortgage reinsurance unit, and it could become profitable as early as, say, 2019.
• A few months back, we mentioned how the kind of artisanal video that used to be made for cable access is now made for YouTube. The latest example is a new online comedy series. It’s called Local Brew. The titular “brew” is Rainier Beer—which has not been a local product for more than a decade.
• Can today’s China be rightfully described as a fascist state? And if so, what kind of light does that shine on the “progressive” western corporations (from Redmond, WA as well as Cupertino, CA) who have all their stuff made there?
• I don’t always agree with Chris Hedges, but he’s spot on when he calls out violent “anarchists” as a “cancer” within the Occupy movement.
• Super Bowl SPQR: An actual exciting game, which went down to the final play. The commercials: the same old misanthropic “hip” violence. The halftime show: more “global superstar” over-the-top-osity, this time with Centurions. At least Madonna didn’t do the fake-English-accent thing this time.
• The folks at KCPQ would really like a Seattle Super Bowl. That is to say, a Super Bowl held in Seattle, not one in which the Seahawks would play (which seems even more remote these days). What would hosting the big game mean locally? Think of it as a big convention. Sixty thousand people (mostly people who can afford $16,000 tickets) descending here for perhaps a week. Oh, and some for-the-locals “fan fest” in the parking lot a couple days before.

sherilynn fenn in 'two moon junction'

The former bit actor (born Zalman Lefkovitz in 1941) made his first big career splash in 1988 when he wrote and produced the softcore classic 9 1/2 Weeks.

That film’s success led to a career as America’s premiere erotic filmmaker of the time, with the minor classics Wild Orchid, Two Moon Junction (Sherilynn Fenn’s springboard to fame), and Delta of Venus (arguably a better Anais Nin adaptation than the higher-budgeted Henry and June).

Even before Henry and June‘s disappointing box office led Hollywood’s theatrical distributors away from sex flicks, King had branched out into late night cable shows, starting with the still-famous Red Shoe Diaries (David Duchovny’s springboard to fame).

In a sub-genre known for some of corporate media’s shoddiest production values, King’s shows and TV-movies stand out. They display lush (if clichéd) lighting/photography and poetic dialogue/narration. The sex scenes are choreographed to convey warmth more than “heat,” accompanied by King’s trademark fusion-jazz sax soundtracks. King helped fund these projects by distributing them on video, emphasizing distribution at Blockbuster and other outlets that didn’t carry hardcore porn.

A devoted family man in spite of his subject matter, his wife and two daughters were key members of his production team.

From time to time he branched out beyond the skin-flick genre, including documentaries about dancers and surfers. But those were sidelines to the sex stuff. Battling cancer in recent years, he kept producing and sometimes directing more TV-movies and series. A pay-per-view website for these was announced last year but never launched.

And yes, he died at the age of 69.

• You know what else women do differently than men? Utilize public transit.
• Metro’s route #42 may be a goner, alas. Next on the chopping block for drastic cutting: the #2 route, one of Metro’s most heavily used and the only direct route from Queen Anne to First Hill and Madrona.
• Republicans in the state Legislature have a new plan to “reform” K-12 education: dump all that distracting stuff about civil rights and combatting gay-bashing.
• Goldy asks if the state legislature can pass gay marriage, why can’t it fix our regressive tax system? Here’s one potential answer: because the Seattle civic establishment (root of most “progressive” moves in this state) loves gays (“minorities” who can still be upscale and white!) and hates anything that might inconvenience big business.
• The newest e-commerce craze: selling breast milk online. (Make your own pun based on old dairy ad slogans if you like.)
• Mitt Romney’s dad was famous for two things: (1) running American Motors during most of its formative years, and (2) being in Nixon’s cabinet, where he helped devise the “mortgage backed securities” that helped bring down the nation’s economy in recent years.
• Another day, another plea for sympathy toward the (hidebound, ultra-inefficient, conglomerate-ruled) traditional book industry. This time it’s from the Authors Guild. They insist it takes tangible books, tangible bookstores, and old-style publishers to “break” new authors. Which would be an interesting argument if the (major) old-style publishers were still truly interested in “breaking” new authors (you know, with actual promotional budgets and marketing support).
• Graham Joyce at the Guardian scoffs at novelist Jeanette Winterston, who seems to want more novels with “daunting” and daring use of language for its own sake. Joyce insists that profound works can be deceptively “readable.”
• A guy’s going around the book-publicity circuit claiming to have “hooked up” (but didn’t always have sex) with 120 women over a year and a half; despite being bald, overweight, and non-wealthy. In other words, women exist who aren’t obsessed with superficial appearance. (This is news?)
• One more Don Cornelius tribute: Ryuichi Sakamoto on Soul Train!

webpronews.com

The premise of Soul Train was elevator-pitch simple: an American Bandstand for soul music. A hip but authoritative producer/host. Kids, dressed in the latest teen fashions, dancing in a studio to the latest hits. Two or more in-person guests each show, performing live or lip-syncing.

Anybody in the industry, including Bandstand impresario Dick Clark, could have launched such a show.

But nobody had (on a national level) until Cornelius came along.

Cornelius had been a news reader and backup DJ on Chicago radio, and had hosted teen “record hops” in the area. He started Soul Train on a local Chicago TV station in 1970. The following year, it moved to syndication (and to Hollywood). Within a year from that, it was on in 25 cities.

By 1974, when its theme song “TSOP” became a top 10 hit, it was an institution. It easily buried the rival show Soul Unlimited (Dick Clark’s imitation of Cornelius’s imitation of Bandstand).

For two more decades, the show was the showcase for soul, R&B, and the emerging hiphop and breakdance scenes.

By 1993, rap and its related dance moves had steadily gotten more “hardcore,” far from Cornelius’s personal tastes. He hired a series of replacement hosts while continuing to own and run the show, which aired on fewer stations in more obscure time slots.

Soul Train wound to a close in 2006. Reruns aired for another couple of years. After that, Cornelius sold the rights to an outside company, which has put out DVD sets and a YouTube clip channel. (Cornelius had tried to keep Soul Train performances off the Internet, employing staff to hunt down, and order the deletion of, any such clips.)

In his later years, the man who’d preached prosocial messages to his young audiences was accused of domestic violence by his estranged second wife.

But the legacy of his career shines on.

“And as always in parting, we wish you love, peace, and soul!”

crypt-orchid.blogspot.com

Today marks David Letterman’s 30th anniversary on late night TV.

Appropriately enough, his principal guest last night was Bill Murray, the first guest on both his NBC (1982) and CBS (1993) premieres.

When the NBC Late Night with David Letterman began, it was a breath of fresh air. It was knowing, it was snide, it respected its audience’s intelligence and its love of the bizarre.

The premiere opened with Calvert DeForrest (descendent of radio pioneer Lee DeForrest) reciting a “be very afraid” spiel in front of the Rainbow Room peacock dancers (yes, female “peacocks,” an actual attraction at the rooftop lounge in the RCA (now GE) Building).

Then came the first mini monologue and the first studio comedy bit (a backstage tour). The Murray segment ended with him and the host suddenly leaving the stage, and the screen switching to old film of the 1973 World Series.

That first episode ended with a comedian reciting the opening scene from an obscure Bela Lugosi movie. By the time I saw that bit, I knew I’d be a fan for life.

•

Letterman, the self-spoofing, genre-busting insurgent, is now the establishment, and has been for some time.

A persona that was once hip-to-be-square is now the grand old curmuddgeon. In this respect, he has become more like his onetime occasional foil Harvey Pekar (as seen above).

A collection of shticks that playfully (or awkwardly) toyed with the established celebrity-talk format has become a well-tuned programming machine, that regularly disseminates well-scrubbed guests plugging their films/shows/CDs.

Little comedy bits that had been cute and playful are now trotted out with slick animated openings and pompous fanfares. More of them these days are pre-taped or assembled from news footage, instead of acted out on stage.

The biggest flaw in Letterman’s current formula is the 12:15 a.m. commercial break, following the first guest spot. It runs between five and eight minutes, stopping the whole proceedings. It essentially begs viewers to shut ‘er down and hit the hay.

Still, there are worse fates to befall a creative performer than to become the sort of bigtime mainstream institution he had once scoffed.

Letterman could have grown old much less gracefully.

Like Leno.

•

PS: Here are some Letterman guest spots that one entertainment site considers classics. At least one actually is an all-time moment—a totally laugh-free, in-character Andy Kaufman spot from Letterman’s 1980 morning show.

PPS: Letterman began his career on Indianapolis TV in the early 1970s. The ill-fated, Seattle-born actress Frances Farmer ended her career in the same place and time. If I ever meet him, I’ll ask if he’d ever met her.

Most cable TV customers in Seattle have to deal with the industry colossus Comcast.

But there’s a second cable provider in town. It covers the neighborhoods Comcast’s various predecessor companies (Viacom, TelePrompTer, AT&T Cable, Group W) chose not to wire up.

This other cable company has variously been known, under various mergers and buyouts, as Seanet, Summit, Millennium, and Broadstripe.

Under all those regimes, it seldom kept up with the services and channel lineups offered by the bigger boys.

But this might finally change.

Broadstripe’s Washington and Oregon operations were bought by a Kirkland firm, Wave Broadband.

It may take a few months, but Wave promises to upgrade these newly acquired systems.

And from the channel lineups on Wave’s existing systems, this upgrade could be substantial.

I’m talking HD versions of some of my fave channels (CBC, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, MSNBC, CNN, AMC, TCM, HBO, NBC Sports Network (formerly Versus, formerly Outdoor Life Network)).

And channels I want but Broadstripe doesn’t carry (IFC, Current, Ovation, Boomerang, CSPAN2, MLB Network, HDNet).

Still no Sundance Channel, though.

uw tacoma

• There are certain streets in any region that fully express the full history and character of their places. Around here, there’s one street that particularly tells the tale of the Northwest, its industry, its development, its hopes and its despairs. I speak of South Tacoma Way. And of the UW-Tacoma students who’ve made a lovely brief history of this important road. It’s available as a free PDF from the link above.
• A couple of Republicans in the state Senate have bravely stood in favor of the gay-marriage bill currently under discussion. Of course, in today’s GOP no good deed goes unpunished.
• Non-scandal of the week: Casual readers might be shocked to learn the University United Methodist Temple holds a weekly “Sext Service.” But it’s really just an informal midweek worship, named after the Latin word for the “sixth hour.” (I was raised Methodist, and they are one of the more liberal mainline-Protestant sects, but they’re not that liberal.)
• No Comment Dept. #1: The Newspaper Association of America’s launched a PR campaign insisting that “Smart is the New Sexy,” and that newspaper reading (print or online) is the way to smartness.
• No Comment Dept. #2: The stolen Seattle men’s pro basketball team will star in a forthcoming Warner Bros. movie. (All right, one comment: Go ahead. Hiss the villains.)
• The intellectual property industry’s Internet censorship drive (via Congress) might be stalled for now, but the industry proceeds on other fronts. Case in point: the Supreme Court’s ruling, on the industry’s behalf, that public domain works can be re-copyrighted.
• David Letterman still has a woman problem.
• Cracked.com, that funny list-based-long-essay site that bought its name from a defunct MAD magazine rival, occasionally runs something that turns out to be deadly serious. Example: “7 Things You Don’t Realize About Addiction (Until You Quit).”

1975 opening; from onelifetolive.wikia.com

(Again this year, I’ve been drafted into participating in the Seattle Invitationals, a contest for Elvis Tribute Artists (ETA; and yes, that acronym is used within this particular scene). In keeping with the 50th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair (and of It Happened at the World’s Fair), this year’s edition is under the Space Needle at the Experience Music Project, 8 p.m. Saturday. Be there or be Fabian.)

• It’s another sad day in TV land. For the fourth time in as many years, a generations-spanning narrative ends. The idea that anything as out-of-thin-air as a fictional yarn could grow and morph and dig itself in for 43 and a half years (in One Life to Live’s case) seems bizarre enough in today’s media sphere. That it did so in the old three-network TV milieu is a testament to (1) the continued ingenuity of producers and writers and actors, and (2) the fact that these productions became so expensive, with such limited revenue models, that the networks would rather reinvent existing shows than replace them. But in the 500-channels-plus-Internet world, even the old-line networks can’t support these dinosaurs of drama. Alas.
• The City of Seattle now has this handy little array of online city maps. One of the niftiest of the batch depicts the different types of street trees you can find around town. “Number one: the larch… the larch…“
• Get ready for more booze in more places in Seattle Center.
• Unlike KPLU, I have a hard time feeling sorry for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
• The McCormick and Schmick’s restaurants were just taken over by the parent company of Bubba Gump Shrimp Co.
• Is the author of a Congressional bill that would make online copyright violators face jail time (aka the bill that would “break the Internet“) himself an online image, er, borrower?
• White “antiracist essayist” Tim Wise considers Ron Paul to be only a few gradations less icky than the Ku Klux Klan.
• The creator of a new sitcom filled with ethnic stereotypes says it’s OK when he invokes stereotypes because he’s gay. Note to the confused: Gay white people are still white people.
• A “sexual politics” blogger would like you all to stop dissing female right-wing politicians with the same “slut”-bashing language you hate when right-wingers themselves use it.
• The concept of a “beer for women” has been tried before and failed. This time, MillerCoors is preparing to market a specially-formulated “bloat resistant” light lager. It’ll come in three named flavors: “Clear Filtered,” “Crisp Rosé,” AND “Zesty Lemon.” What’s even more bizarre is the name they’ve given the thing: “Animée.” It’s French for “livened up.” But you and I know it won’t be out three seconds before someone asks whether it’s the favorite beverage of, say, Sailor Moon.

• Half of Mt. Baker Adams’s glaciers are gone. Will the Republicans exhort us to let them finish the job?
• Sue Basko from Occupy L.A. has a guide to stop your protest from getting “hijacked,” either by peripheral single-issue groups, cults of personality, or opponents who want to make you look bad.
• Retired TV news producer Sandy Goodman calls today’s Republican Party “The Single Biggest Threat to America.”
• Harold Pollack reminds us that Ron Paul has more baggage, beyond the racist diatribes issued under his name.  Seems Paul’s purist devotion to the “you’re on your own” social meme extends to hating Medicare, Aid to Dependent Children, and other safety-net mainstays.
• The question shouldn’t be whether Pat Buchanan’s out at MSNBC. The question should be why the channel kept him on for so long, as a Morning Joe panelist and pundit/interviewee on other shows. If I were a conspiracy theorist (which I’m not), I’d suggest he was the channel’s house conservative because its leaders liked to make conservatives look bad.
• PoMo alert: Here come buildings designed vaguely like trees, but which are not in trees and do not directly incorporate trees (except to the extent that they have lumber in them).
• The most wholesomely erotic sight you’ll likely see this week: underwater stills of one naked Russian woman and two whales (also naked).