pride parade viewers at the big popsicle

(A relatively long edition this time, bear with.)

• So, who’s responsible for the giant Popsicle art piece (an instant popular hit!) at Martin Selig’s Fourth and Blanchard Building? It’s Mrs. Selig.
• Architecture critic Lawrence W. Cheek sees the Amazon.com campus in South Lake Union as “sleek, stiff, anonymous modern boxes, impeccably executed, with rarely a whiff of whimsy or personality.”
• Wright Runstad, the real estate developer who’s got the lease on most of the old Beacon Hill hospital building (where Amazon.com was headquartered until recently) have proposed a deal with King County. The county would move its juvie court and jail up the hill (paying rent to WR), while selling WR the current juvie campus south of Seattle U (nine eminently developable acres).
• UW computer science researchers are trying to write an algorithm to generate “that’s what she said” jokes.
• Some anonymous person posted crude web-animations snarking about fictionalized versions of Renton police personnel. Renton police want to find and jail whoever did it; thus proving themselves eminently worthy of such ridicule.
• Without illegal immigrants, say buh-bye to Wash. state agriculture.
• Local composer David Hahn pleas for an end to the decimation of arts funding.
• Family and friends of the slain native carver John T. Williams have finished a memorial totem pole. The 32-foot carving is supposed to be installed in Seattle Center. Sometime.
• White artists in South Africa are now depicting themselves as outsiders.
• Bad Ads #1: When fashion magazines and their advertisers depict 10-12 year old girls looking “sexy,” are they really promoting anorexia?
• Bad Ads #2: Did the London Olympics promoters who used the Clash’s “London Calling” in a commercial even listen to the song first?
• Do violent deaths really rise during Republican presidencies? One author claims so.
• Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has a new advisor. It’s Robert Bork, the onetime Supreme Court nominee. Bork, you might recall, hates porn, birth control, feminism, the Civil Rights Act, and free speech. Romney, you might recall, is billing himself as the sane alternative to the other Republicans who want to be President.
• Economist Umair Haque, whom I’ll say more about next week in this space, believes declining consumer spending isn’t part of the problem, it’s part of the solution.
• For two consecutive years, a suburban Minnesota high school’s idea of homecoming-week fun was to have white kids dressing up like stereotypes of black kids. Somebody finally sued.
• There’s another political move to negate your online rights. As usual, the excuse is “protecting children.”
• Contrary to prior announcements, Jerry Lewis will not make a cameo final appearance at this year’s muscular dystrophy telethon (itself no longer a true telethon, just a really long special). Perhaps that means the show can finally stop depicting “Jerry’s Kids” as pitiful waif victims, and instead depict ordinary, fully extant boys and girls (and men and women) who simply have a medical condition.

sorry, maude, you didn't make the list

• Julianne Escobedo Shepherd offers a list of 10 (American, prime time) “TV shows that changed the world.” It includes some of the usual suspects (Ellen, Mary Tyler Moore, the original Star Trek) but leaves out so many other possibilities. Where’s Yogi and Boo Boo in the same bed all winter, or all the early variety shows with interracial love-song duets?
• Seattle PostGlobe, the spunky li’l local news and arts site started by ex P-I reporter Kery Murakami (and for which I posted a couple of pieces), is closing up shop after two years and change. With Murakami gone to Long Island, NY and many other original volunteer contributors off in other jobs (or other careers), the site had mainly become a spot for Bill White’s film reviews. Without the funding to maintain the site’s operation, let alone to build it into a stronger endeavor, its current boss (and cofounder) Sally Deneen is pulling the plug. She’s keeping it up in archival form.
• In other local media news, technical workers at KIRO-TV have been at a labor impasse for some15 months now. The IBEW Local 46 claims they’re just trying to preserve contractual language “that respects their individual and collective rights that are afforded to them under federal law.”
• Copper thieves have no respect for anyone or anything. Not even for the local branch of Gilda’s Club. That’s the drop-in cancer support center, named after Gilda Radner and housed in that fake Monticello office building at Broadway and East Union.
• The bicyclist struck by a hit-and-run SUV Thursday? He was a photographer and office worker for an international health agency. And how he’s dead.
• Wherever there’s a business with a predominantly male clientele, there’s somebody trying to attract female customers. The latest result comes from the UK branch of Molson Coors (you did know those beer companies had merged years ago, right?). They’re test marketing a pink beer for women. Even stranger: It’s called “Animée.” Which begs the question, would Sailor Moon drink it? How about the Ghost in the Shell?
• Lee Fang sees a cartel of “shadowy right wing front groups” spending lotsa bucks to get Congress obsessed with “the deficit” (i.e., with dismantling anything government does to help non-billionaires) instead of the economy. I don’t think the drive is all that shadowy. These outfits, their funding sources, and their biases are well known and well documented—and still scary.
• Dan Balz sees today’s Republicans as being at war against Democrats, against the middle class, against women, against sanity, and now against one another.
• Remember: Tonight (Saturday the 30th) is the annual Seafair Torchlight Parade bisecting Belltown and downtown along Fourth Avenue. This year’s grand marshal is smaller-than-he-used-to-be TV personality and Sounders FC spokesmodel Drew Carey. (The organizers tried to get someone else for the role, but they bid over the actual retail price.)

menu screen from 'mickey, donald, goofy: the three musketeers'

• We’ve just gotten over the official end of VHS a couple years ago, when now some are predicting the DVD’s similar fate. Sure, online streaming is cool if you have the bandwidth and can stand the re-buffering pauses at inopportune moments. But what about the bonus features? I’ll say it again: what about the bonus features? I want my bonus features, dammit!
• Our long local nightmare is over. What did it take to get the Mariners to actually win a baseball game after three ghastly, fallow weeks? Perhaps it was the sudden, tragic passing of one of the team’s charter employees (and best loved stadium figures), Rick the Peanut Guy.
• The city’s got a new Transit Master Plan. It identifies corridors that could use some transpo beefing up. One of them is Ballard (where, if you recall, the Monorail Project was to have gone). Now the city thinks it’d be a nice place for a streetcar (which, unlike a monorail, will be subject to the same traffic jams as cars). (BTW, this wish list is irrelevant to the more vital task, that of preserving what transit options we’ve got now from budgetary decimation.)
• On the national front, Jim Hightower pleads for any national politician to pay attention to working people instead of partisan idiocy; while Earl Ofari Hutchinson explains why Obama can’t take the big unilateral steps on the economy that FDR took. And Andrew Sullivan calls today’s GOP “not conservatives but anarchists,” obsessed only with destroying the Obama presidency even if the nation’s destroyed along with it.
• With its never-say-die attitude toward expanding its range of market segments, Costco’s re-formulated initiative to privatize liquor sales has qualified for the November ballot.
• And remember, tonight’s “Last Thursday,” the final public event in the prematurely condemned 619 Western artist studios.

• Among the Plan Vs, Plan Ws, and Plan Xs to resolve the Republican-invented “debt ceiling crisis” (which, as pundit Eric Byler notes, is “as fake as professional wrestling“) is a joint House/Senate committee that would have extra-ordinary powers to shape legislation that the full bodies would not get to amend. Huffington Post calls it a “Super Congress.” Now if we only had a “Super President,” like the one in a 1967 TV cartoon of the same name. (Yes, I am old enough to have seen the show during its one network run, and yes, I did.)
• Speaking of fantasy entertainments, Hong Kong scientists claim their tests with photons prove nothing can go faster than light. Then, they extrapolate from that to claim that therefore, time travel is impossible. Well, there are any number of Whovians who would argue about that.
• The King County Council failed to vote on Monday about the utterly necessary plan to save Metro Transit. Let’s hope the delay means enough votes are being attained.
• Who (heart)s, or at least partly defends, the Oslo terror killer? There’s Glenn Beck. And there’s a Wall St. Journal op-ed imploring its readers not to let a little thing like a mass murderer dissuade them from the true paths of racism and Islamophobia. Andrew Sullivan, meanwhile, identifies the shooter as an example of “Christianism,” which he defines as “the desperate need to control all the levers of political power to control or guide the lives of others.”
• Good news for all of us who’ve been totally bummed out by the Mariners’ record dive—turns out there will be pro football this year after all.
• If you’re going to the UW campus, don’t masturbate in public. Leave that to the profs.

• Seattle artist Ginny Ruffner’s giant plastic robotic flower pot is now fully operational at Seventh Avenue and Union Street, across from ACT Theatre and in front of the back end of the Sheraton Hotel. Any resemblance to “Wilting Willie,” the puppet flower pot from the old local kids’ TV show Wunda Wunda, is purely coincidental.
• Update #1: Upon the request of the Tulalip Tribes, Microsoft has removed the internal code name “Tulalip” from its otherwise not officially announced social networking project.
• Update #2: There will indeed be one last art party at the 619 Western studios, before all 100-or-so artists in the 101-year-old building get evicted. The hastily arranged event is “Last Thursday,” to be held, yes, on July 28.
• The state Liquor Board’s response to Seattle’s request to let bars stay open after 2 a.m.? They’ll “consider it.”
• War on Working Americans Dept.: Someone allegedly turned on heat lamps beamed at a picket line outside an on-strike Hyatt hotel in Chicago, in the middle of the worst heat wave America (except the Pac NW) has seen in years.
• There’s now a foosball table with female players! And they’re not Barbies!
• Today, we are all Sons and Daughters of Norway.

About three weeks ago, I wrote about the long term decline of cable access TV, once one of Seattle’s most fertile loci of creativity.

Today, of course, we have online video streaming.

This is so much more convenient for niche-audience programming in several ways. Viewers don’t have to tune in at any specific time. They can easily catch up with past episodes. They can watch wherever they have a computer (or tablet or smart phone) and a broadband or WiFi connection.

And with contemporary digital video gear so much cheaper to buy (or rent) these days, low-budget and no-budget producers can accomplish quite a degree of slickness.

Take for example The Spit Show with Indus & Raquel (produced by Indus Alelia, written and directed by Dan Desrosiers, hosted by Alelia and Raquel Werner).

Like many cable access comedy shows of the 1990s, The Spit Show consists of comedy and music bits, with continuing characters and a loose storyline.

But unlike those older shows, it has fancy production values and is edited with brisk comic pacing.

And without a weekly time slot to fill, it can put out episodes of any length (more or less 10 minutes) at a relatively leisurely frequency (four episodes since February).

Alelia and Werner aren’t asking you to be home at any particular time. They’re not asking you to invest 29 minutes into deciding whether you like their work.

But if you do like their work, they’d like you to keep coming back.

"rupert bear," ironically, was and is a comic in the non-murdoch owned london express.

The sometimes fiercely divided left and progressive factions in the U.S. are today united on one overriding desire.

They’d all like to see the phone-hacking and bribery scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers result in the collapse of Murdoch’s American media empire.

Especially of the (deservedly) fiercely-despised Fox News Channel.

Could it happen?

Lefty pundits are pondering possible scenarios that could potentially lead to the sell-off and /or dismemberment of Murdoch’s stateside properties.

Such a move, these pundits guess, could be triggered by shareholders deathly afraid of the Murdochs’ sullied reputations ruining News Corp.’s American brands. Even if no direct link surfaces between the U.S. properties and the Murdoch U.K. papers’ scandals.

I’m not so sure.

If forced to do so, the Murdoch family could sell off its stock in, and retire from leadership of, the Fox broadcast network and its 27 network-owned stations. That move could avert any challenges to those local stations’ FCC licenses.

(Most Fox broadcast affiliates are owned by other companies. Here, KCPQ is owned by the Tribune Co.)

Such a spinoff could leave the Murdochs still in charge of the 20th Century-Fox film studio, along with its TV-production and home-video divisions. Rupert and his offspring could still own The Simpsons, even if they no longer owned the network on which it airs.

The family could also sell what’s left of the once mighty Wall Street Journal and Barron’s; perhaps to Bloomberg.

The assorted Fox cable channels are another potential matter altogether.

For one thing, the FCC doesn’t oversee the ownership of or content on cable channels.

And when Viacom spun off its former subsidiary CBS into a separate company again, some of Viacom’s cable properties (MTV, CMT) stayed with Viacom, while others (Showtime, The Movie Channel) became part of the new CBS Corp.

The Murdochs could sell off FX, Fox Movie Channel, Fox Soccer Channel, Speed, Fuel TV, Fox’s distribution/marketing contract with the National Geographic Channel, and its partnerships in the remaining regional FSN sports channels.

And they could keep Fox News Channel and Fox Business Channel.

Just to spite us liberals.

And with the money they get from selling their shares of all those other properties, the family could even keep subsidizing the New York Post for a few more years.

• One of the ex-News of the World editors allegedly being investigated in the phone-hacking scandal—CNN star Piers Morgan.
• Why film industry incentives in Wash. state should be brought back—not just for Hollywood location shoots but for home-grown productions, like the Spokane production co. trying to sell a network sitcom.
• What we miss with Sonics basketball gone—$100 million dollars in economic activity per year.
• A West Seattle nursery owner faces foreclosure, due largely to Bank of America bureaucracy.
• A gay activist infiltrated Michelle Bachmann’s hubby’s “therapy” operation and now claims, yes, the outfit does attempt to make people “ex-gay.”
• The Scott Walker junta in Wisconsin has gotten lotsa money and advice from a right wing foundation once led by a John Birch Society boss.
• Lori Gottlieb avers that “the obsession with our kids’ happiness may be dooming them to unhappy adulthoods.”
• A Microsoft mobile-software architect foresees a future universal operating system from MS, or a “single ecosystem,” encompassing PCs, tablets, phones, TVs, etc. But it might not carry the “Windows” brand.
• Good news! According to GQ, Seattle is only America’s 34th worst dressed city!

(Answer to yesterday’s riddle: The $25,000 Pyramid.)

It’s a shame so many modern-day folk only know Roald Dahl as a “children’s writer.” He was more of a gruesome fabulist, some of whose stories were marketed as children’s fare.

Even the most famous screen version of his darker side, the once ubiquitously-rerun UK TV series Tales of the Unexpected, isn’t widely associated with Dahl. He hosted the show’s first two seasons, which mostly were adapted from his prose. After he quit the show, it continued another seven seasons without him. The show became noticeably lighter in tone as it evolved further away from Dahl’s conceptions.

But for straight-no-chaser Dahl misanthropy, though, there’s no better visual source than ‘Way Out. (Yes, it was spelled that way.)

It was one of the last prime time anthology shows made in New York. It was produced by David Susskind. Dahl introduced the episodes and wrote only the first, an adaptation of his own story William and Mary. But they all display a devilish cruelty.

Of the 14 episodes produced in 1961, five have made it onto the collectors’ circuit, and from there to YouTube. Those can all be found at this link.

Most of them have no sympathetic or even likable characters. There are no Rod Serling moral lessons, and no Alfred Hitchcock ironic twists. It’s all morbid and deadly.

Which, of course, made it a commercial flop.

And so much fun.

You can tell you’re not in Serling-land right at the opening logo sequence. It’s a series of human hands, reaching up in futility from the ground (buried alive?).

• Where the state fails, the city steps up, today’s edition: With no more govt.-sponsored tourism promotion in Washington, Seattle might tax hotels for its own tourist ads.
• Tuesday’s County Council hearing on the scheme to impose a car-tab surtax to save Metro Transit: Stuffed to overflowing with citizens, sparse on County Council members.
• You know that deal for Electronic Arts to buy Seattle’s PopCap Games, the deal PopCap management emphatically denied? It’s real, and it’s on.
• Rupert Murdoch will stop trying to buy all of the satellite TV company BSkyB after all.
• So far, the Murdoch newspaper scandals in Britain haven’t been directly tied to his U.S. properties. Well, here’s a fresh, all-American scandal for you: Murdoch’s Stateside businesses not only pay no income taxes, but clever exploitation of every tax dodge on the books has let Murdoch get $1 billion or more in tax refunds each of the past four years.
• Re/Search Books cofounder V. Vale, seeing his industry falter against the winds of tech-induced change, proclaims “If I were an alien from Outer Space wanting to ruin life on Planet Earth, I think I’d invent the Internet.”
• RIP Sherwood Schwartz, 94, the radio and TV comedy writer who became the creator-producer of Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch. Fun fact: Schwartz later admitted he’d named the S.S. Minnow after Newton Minow, the FCC commissioner who’d denounced most of primetime TV as “a vast wasteland.”
• Speaking of which, Joe Berkowitz has handy tips for those of us who refuse to live in televisual abstinence and who continually take gruff for it.
• While on the big screen, Carina Chocano sees all these “strong women” movie characters and hates ’em. She says they’re not identifiable as women, but just as a different set of stereotypes.
• New Lake City strip club owner: We’re really an “adult cabaret,” and a respectable business too.
• And there are many other stories out there, important stuff about the fate of humanity and all. But there’s only one topic on all online users’ minds this day. How dare Netflix raise its rates?

vintage 1940 trolley bus from seattletransitblog.com

• Today is the day. Speak now or forever lose your ability to get anywhere in King County, with or without a car. That’s how big this is. Get thee to the King County Council Chambers, 516 Third Ave., 6-8 p.m. Speak out to save transit.
• Is local weather really getting “wetter and warmer”? Cliff Mass says not necessarily.
• After the state failed earlier this year, the city may strike out on its own to license and regulate medical marijuana establishments. The first regulations I’d want: no pot-leaf neon signs, no tie dyed scrubs, and no public display of the phrase “da kine.”
• City Councilmember Tim Burgess wants the big public todo about child prostitution to become a little less about the rival grandstandings of celebs, politicians, and publishers, and a little more about the children themselves. At least that’s what I hope Burgess wants.
• The Thunderbird Motel that became the Fremont Inn, one of the notorious drug-dealer-infused motels on Aurora shut down a year or two back? It could become Catholic-run low income housing.
• The state’s sending up helicopters to test local radiation levels. But don’t panic, officials insist.
• The old idea to put up a surplus 60 foot Lava Lamp in the tiny Eastern Wash. burg of Soap Lake? It’s on again.
• You might not have heard of it yet, but there’s a longshoremen’s protest at a new grain terminal in Longview, where management has hired nonunion workers. A recent protest got 100 union dock workers and supporters arrested.
• A Daily Kos diarist compares the continuing nonsense over the federal deficit to “worrying about the water bill when the house is on fire.”
• Time claims Americans “distinguish toiler paper brands better than banks.” Insert snarky comments here.
• What are the chances that l’affaire Murdoch could cause the decline and fall of the Fox “News” Channel? Not much, I believe; at least not directly or right away. Murdoch’s UK papers used grody methods to amass information about politicians, celebrities, the royal family, and even violent-crime victims. Fox “News” doesn’t give a damn about information; it just makes crap up.

all my children newspaper ad 1986

Just when we had programmed the ol’ DVR to record the final two months of All My Children, came word that it (and sister show One Life to Live) might just come back from the dead like Lazarus Tad.

ABC announced it had licensed both long-running daytime soaps to something called Prospect Park, a production company run by ex-execs of Disney (ABC’s parent company). The venture would continue production of new episodes, to be shown online only (not on broadcast or cable TV).

Given that online advertising draws far fewer bucks per viewer/reader than broadcast or print advertising, and given that no five-day-a-week scripted TV drama has succeeded anywhere but on the traditional big three networks (except the noble experiment that was Norman Lear’s Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman), many commentators on soap-themed online message boards have doubted the viability of such a venture.

Now comes word that there might be a government subsidy involved.

Really.

The unconfirmed rumor is that Prospect Park was waiting for, and received, money from some grant program intended to help jump start “new media ventures.”

That’s just one of the many still unanswered questions about this supposed reprieve for two of entertainment’s most venerable brands, for stories that have unfolded for more than four decades.

When will they be revealed?

Apparently very slowly.

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.”

• Yay to New York for approving gay marriage. We almost forgive you for that dumb NYT paean on Fri., lauding the Portland Timbers soccer team for being almost as successful as the Sounders.
• In other sports news, the UW is soliciting naming rights to the soon-to-be-remodeled Husky Stadium’s “field,” starting in 2013 and continuing “in perpetuity.”
• Big corporations don’t want to be forced to reveal how their CEOs’ salaries compare to their average payrolls. Ah, poor zillionaires….
• Rolling Stone had a harrowing piece a while back about a teenage girl who set herself up as an Internet fashion plate and video blogger, only to attract adult lechers and worse.
• There’s a new art gallery in town, Prographica, specializing in “fine works on paper.” In one of those happy coincidences, its staff includes a UW MFA grad named Kimberly Clark.

• Buzzfeed compares/contrasts“Actual News Headlines Vs. Fox News Headlines.” Hilarity ensues.
• Gene Weingarten rejects the idea that all of us have to “brand” ourselves.
• On a similar note, Zacqary Adam Green insists that musicians, artists, writers, teachers, etc. should not view themselves as mere “content creators”:

If you are a maker of things, a disseminator of knowledge, or anyone who contributes to the collective intellectual output of human beings, do not accept the notion that your work is less significant than a house, a chair, a piece of electronic equipment, or a rock. Do not allow yourself to be labeled as a mere “content creator.” Have more dignity than that.