• 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.

The Columbo star played a stunning variety of roles, from heroes to villains, from romantic leads to comic sidekicks, and even The Twilight Zone’s version of Fidel Castro. Don’t fret about him being gone from us. He’ll come back as a landed angel, for the coffee and cigarettes.

This department hasn’t been updated in a while. During those past months, the SeaTimes has pretty much stabilized at a probably unprofitable level.

Circulation dropped another 5 percent in the past year.

The paper’s Wednesday and Friday editorial sections have gone back to single pages.

Actual “this happened yesterday” news items are decreasing, especially early in the week, in favor of prewritten features (easier to plan and to budget for).

Display advertising in the daily paper continues to be nearly nonexistent, with the four page Fry’s section on Fridays as the only consistent exception. If not for that, the paid obits, and the car and real-estate ads on Friday and Saturday, the daily SeaTimes would essentially exist (as a business venture) only as a wraparound for the Bartell’s and supermarket inserts.

The Sunday paper still has 30 to 40 pages of ads, not counting the inserts. And now the Sunday TV section (12 full-page equivalents with almost no ads) is gone. It’s been replaced by something called TV Weekly, a separate listings magazine for which subscribers have to pay extra.

And the paper’s planning to vacate its handsome 1930 art deco HQ on Fairview Ave. by the end of the year. Remaining employees will move into the nearby 1000 Denny (née Seattle Furniture Mart) building, which the company has sold and partly leased back. The historic-landmark SeaTimes building dates back to when almost all newspapers had their newsrooms and printing presses on the same site. (The SeaTimes is now printed at an increasingly under-capacity facility out in Mill Creek.) The old building will be mothballed pending a development scheme; such a plan would need city Landmarks Board approval.

In past installments of this department, I’d speculated that the Blethen family’s final endgame might be to turn the paper into an even smaller nonprofit operation, designed to live on the kind support of corporate benefactors. Now, as David Goldstein speculates on the basis of a recent editorial, the Blethens could be contemplating just such a scenario, and may be pushing for Federal help to make it so.

• I’ve ranted here in the past about certain dot-coms whose whole reason for being is verbal content, but which refuse to pay their writers. Turns out that even “content mill” dot-coms that do pay their writers work them to death. Lots of unpaid overtime, high quotas, short schedules, no pretense of quality, everything search-engine-optimized to smithereens. And the results didn’t even work fiscally, as recounted by “an AOL content slave.”
• Non-news of the day: Ebooks don’t need printers but they still need editors.
• The Brave New Films dudes have a handy dandy guide to the Koch Bros.’ moves behind the scenes of the right wing opinion machine; while Mr Jon Stewart lists a few dozen Fox News lies.
• As you know, I don’t like it whenever a woman brands “men,” as a singular collective entity, as “potential rapists.” I also don’t like it when a man does much the same thing—as a convoluted explanation of/justification for sexual assault. This man, whom I sorry to say shares my birth date, is the real Dilbert.
• Daily Kos has uncovered a Congressmember who loves Green Lantern and is willing to admit it.

The Honeymooners writer and Get Smart! producer would be worth a long obit just for his TV and film work. But he also created the Mad Libs books, and cofounded Price/Stern/Sloan Publishing to put them out. The company became a huge supplier of point-of-sale minibooks.

You may now tell your own jokes about fill-in-the-blanks obituary articles.

While Hooters may be gone from Seattle now, there are now several other “breastaurant” chains now serving up sports-bar food via low-cut waitress costumes around the country.

And one of them even uses the name “Twin Peaks,” with no permission from David Lynch (thanks to the vagaries of trademark law).

(Thanx and hat tip to Ronald Holden.)

All you people out there who love to boast at the tops of your voices about not having owned a TV in ___ years: You’re not nearly as “special” as you think you are.

The great decimation of one of America’s greatest art forms continues, with the sudden cancellation of both All My Children and One Life to Live.

As noted by Knute Berger, whose aunt was one of the genre’s most venerable actors, these programs seemed to come from another time, another place, another world. They had an eternal, ethereal sense about them, even when they were trying (usually badly) to be young and hip.

It was Agnes Nixon’s (creator of both AMC and OLTL) careful juxtaposition of the universal and the with-it (by suburban standards) that made AMC, in particular, the darling of the young ladies of my teen and college years. It was the reason there are so many women in their 30s these days sporting the names “Erica” and “Tara” (the female corners of the show’s original love-rectangle storyline).

Around this time, there was also a Seattle tie-in to AMC. It seemed to be the place characters kept moving to whenever the producers wanted to drop somebody without killing them off. In the 1990s, two real local businesses were named after fictional businesses on the show—Cortland Computer (in Pine Valley, Palmer Cortland’s high-tech empire; in Seattle, an early ISP) and GlamORama (in PV, Opal’s hair salon; in Seattle, a funky fashion and novelty-gift boutique).

As I’ve written here previously, there’s no more real business model for these shows. Even as more people are working from home (or not working), the archtype of the stay-home mom having “her stories” on during housework has been passé for so long it’s not even retro anymore. In a cable/internet world, scripted drama episodes meant to be seen only once are simply not cost-effective. (ABC previously announced it’s dumping its SoapNet cable channel.)

Domestic drama stories can be told in any medium or format. But the particular qualities of the serials—multiple storylines, no single lead character, no single climactic moment, no ending, no season breaks—those assets belong to the soaps and a very few other genres (mainly certain comic strips and comic books). It’s perfectly possible to have open ended storytelling in Net video “webisodes,” but they’d pretty much need commercial backing of some sort. (Indie productions usually can’t offer long-term contracts to a dozen or more actors.)

Will a savvy marketer try this?

Tune in tomorrow.

Joanna White at (the formerly locally based) Slate.com sees Charlie Sheen’s public meltdown (which I still believe he’d at least partly contrived, as a stunt to get out of his TV contract) as a sign of hope.

White wishes “mean sitcoms” with their insult gags and mutual-deprecation-society casts would go away. She would like the probable end of Two and a Half Men to portend the whole sub-genre’s oblivion.

I’m not so sure it’ll happen.

There’s at least one cable half-channel (Adult Swim) whose “humor” is built entirely around inhumanity. Perhipheral characters suffer and die violent deaths, and the main characters shrug it off with a quickie one-liner.

And since even cheapo Flash-based animation has a long production lead time, even a sudden sea change in the public ethos won’t end those shows very soon. Though it could render them fatally unhip.

UPDATE #1: Matt Zoller Seitz at Salon.com suggests a reason for all the current TV series centered around the celebration of aggressive, obnoxious, middle-aged, alpha-male “heroes.” Seitz sez it’s because that’s the psychological profile of all the studio and network bosses in charge of greenlighting the shows, the guys to whom the shows’ creators and producers must suck up.

UPDATE #2: In Stephen Battaglio’s excellent biography David Susskind: A Televised Life, producer Leonard Stern (Susskind’s associate on Get Smart! and He & She, and coincidentally also the creator of the Mad Libs books) is quoted as saying pro-social comedy’s a lot harder to write than insult comedy:

A comedy based on love—and I really believe this one [He & She] was—is harder to sell and harder to sustain…. Why? I don’t know. But comedy writers generally can do deprecating humor much more readily and easily than they can humor that is loving and caring.

To any sane person (other than a marketer or a techie), the current Hollywood major-studio feature films are by and large loud and idiotic.

How did they get this way?

Mark Harris, writing in GQ, has his own theory. To Harris, there was a time when the likes of Star Wars and Jaws could coexist in the multiplexes with the likes of An Officer and a Gentleman and The Shining. Then….

Then came Top Gun. The man calling the shots may have been Tony Scott, but the film’s real auteurs were producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, two men who pioneered the “high-concept” blockbuster—films for which the trailer or even the tagline told the story instantly. At their most basic, their movies weren’t movies; they were pure product—stitched-together amalgams of amphetamine action beats, star casting, music videos, and a diamond-hard laminate of technological adrenaline all designed to distract you from their lack of internal coherence, narrative credibility, or recognizable human qualities. They were rails of celluloid cocaine with only one goal: the transient heightening of sensation.

That’s exactly what’s also wrong with America’s political discourse.

A cable TV channel (founded by a Hollywood studio) has taken effective control of one of the two major parties. Along with its radio pundit counterparts, it dumbs down all debate into simplistic emotional manipulations. You’re not even supposed to think about what they’re saying. You’re just supposed to react with anger/hubris/fear on cue.

PS: The 2011 Oscars? What a bore of self congratulatory tripe. Even more than usual.

The celebrities and their handlers are not even pretending, for the most part, to be living in a world remotely resembling the real America of the bottom 98 percent.

the ordeal was “sped up” in the wrong way, by taking out any potential for spontaneity and water cooler moments, leaving the bare bones outline of the massive droning ritual with no “breathing room,” no chance for personality or creativity. Much like your standard assembly line major studio movies themselves. The only “moments,” such as they were, were a senile Kirk Douglas refusing to stick to the script and the appearance of Mr Trent Reznor in a tux. That and a sharp political barb by the Best Documentary winner were, I am afraid, it.

One more reason for me to say: Save the movies. Kill Hollywood.