• Ida Kay Greathouse, who ran or co-ran the Frye Art Museum for more than four decades, died at the impressive age of 105. With her husband Walser (executor of meat packer Charles Frye’s estate), then on her own after Walser’s death in 1966, Greathouse kept the Frye free, and kept its laser focus on “realist” art. She paved the way for later curators’ expansion of the museum’s mission into more contemporary genres.
• The 619 Western art studio building lives! Probably. State transportation planners, who still want to dig the Alaskan Way Viaduct’s replacement tunnel beneath 619’s less than totally solid foundations, said they’ll now try to work out a plan to shore up the building without upscaling it out of the artists’ price range. We shall see.
• The Red Dress concert special, a Seattle Channel/KCTS presentation that aired this past week, can still be viewed online at Seattlechannel.org. The show highlights a rock/punk/blues/funk fusion outfit that’s still as vital as it was three decades ago. Who’d like to scour for donations, so’s we can have more showcase concerts like this on local public TV?
• The Neptune Theater in the U District closes this weekend as a cinema, to reopen later on as a live performance space. I remember the Neptune’s heyday in the ’80s as a “repertory cinema,” showing a different new or classic bill every night. There was a suggestion book at the concession counter. I used to write in silly double bill ideas like M and Z. If the book were still there, I’d now be suggesting a twin bill of 127 Hours and A Farewell to Arms.

I can imagine the next stage in this saga.

Get ready for “The Legally Prohibited From Being Defiantly Truthful on Television Tour.”

A few days late but always more than welcome, it’s the yummy return of the annual MISCmedia In/Out List.

As always, this listing denotes what will become hot or not-so-hot during the next year, not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you believe everything big now will just keep getting bigger, I can get you a Hummer dealership really cheap.

I know a LOT of people who are spending this day and upcoming night wishing a good riddance to this epic fail of a year we’ve had.

The economy in much of the world (for non-zillionaires) just continued to sluggishly sputter and cough. Thousands more lost jobs, homes, 401Ks, etc.

The implosion of the national Republican Party organization cleared the way (though not in this state) for a wave of pseudo-populist demagogue candidates who only appeared in right-wing media, because those were the only places where their nonsensical worldviews made pseudo-sense. Enough of these candidates made enough of a stir to take control of the US House of Reps., which they have already turned back over to their mega-corporate masters.

And we had the BP spill, continuing mideast/Afghan turmoils, violent drug-turf wars in several countries, floods in Pakistan, a bad quake in Haiti, the deaths of a lot of good people, and a hundred channels of stupid “reality” shows.

Locally, a number of ballot measures were introduced to at least stem the state’s horrid tax unfairness, while staving off the worst public-service budget cuts. They all failed.

And the South Park bridge was removed without a clear replacement schedule, the Deeply Boring Tunnel project continued apace, the Seattle Times got ever crankier (though it stopped getting thinner), and our major men’s sports teams were mediocre as ever. Seattle Center bosses chose to replace a populist for-profit concession (the Fun Forest) with an upscale-kitsch for-profit concession (Chihuly).

Alleviating factors: (Most) American troops are out of Iraq. Something approximating health care reform, and something approximating the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, both passed. Conan O’Brien resurfaced; Jon and Stephen worked to restore sanity and/or fear. The Storm won another title. The football Huskies had a triumphant last hurrah; the Seahawks might get the same. Cool thingamajigs like the iPad and Kinect showed up. Seattle has emerged as the fulcrum of the ebook industry, America’s fastest growing media genre. The Boeing 787’s continued hangups have proven some technologies just can’t be outsourced.

My personal resolution in 1/1/11 and days beyond: To find myself a post-freelance, post-journalism career.

MTV.com has, today, finally posted all of $5 Cover Seattle.

Local filmmaker Lynn Shelton completed the “webisode” music/drama series over a year ago. But the MTV bureaucrats sat on it ’til now.

If only Shelton had had someone in her life who could have warned her about working with this company.

Oh, wait….

• A bunch of preppy white people, some pushing 50, lip syncing to the Black Eyed Peas, or
• The nation’s oldest and most established mass media conglomerate stealing shticks from Shoreline and Shorecrest high school video classes?

I love snow in Seattle. Always have. Always will.

Yet I know many of you have had an ordeal these past two days. Remote power outages; all-night commutes home; lost retail traffic, etc.

So I will forego my annual essay about why I love city snow so much.

I will give only a little verbal image.

I overlook a shorter building next door. This morning its roof was covered with just a remaining dusting of snow. Etched into this were dozens of pigeon footprints, in random curving paths reminiscent of a dotted Sunday Family Circus townscape. Cute beyond cute.

So I will leave you with Seattle’s official song of winter.

Stan Boreson \”Winter Underwear\” on \”The Lawrence Welk Show,\” 1957

ARI UP OF THE SLITS: Some of the first-generation punk rock women copied, mocked, or expanded on the then-traditional bad-boy rocker tropes. Ari Up, with her bandmates, did something different. They created a sound that was neither “fuck me” nor “fuck you.” It was totally rocking, totally strong, and totally feminine. And it’s seldom been matched.

BOB GUCCIONE: His masterwork, the first two decades of Penthouse magazine, was not merely a “more explicit” imitation of Playboy, as some commentators have described it. It had its own aesthetic, its own fully formed identity.

And so did its originator. If Playboy founder Hugh Hefner was more like William Randolph Hearst (a hermit philosopher secluded on his private estate), Guccione was more like Charles Foster Kane (living with gusto, building and losing a fortune). A Rolling Stone profile, published just before Guccione reluctantly gave up control of what was left of the Penthouse empire, depicts the open-shirted, gold-chain-bearing mogul as a man who poured millions into “life extension” research, even while he smoked the five packs of cigarettes a day that took much of his mouth in 1999 and his life last week.

TOM BOSLEY: Now we may never know what happened to Richie’s older brother.

Some in the City government think they’ve found an easy budget cutting target.

It’s the cable access channel.

Even though its funding comes from cable subscription taxes and is supposed to be dedicated toward improving citizen access to communications technology.

Don’t let ’em do it.

The Cooking Channel (not to be confused with the Food Network!) is showing reruns of The Galloping Gourmet from the ealry 1970s.

This is the earliest cooking show I remember ever watching complete episodes of.

That’s because Graham Kerr was a comedian in the guise of a foodie. He had his schticks, his physical comedy bits, his gags, his mugging funny faces. And because his act was grounded in the presentation of a real recipe of the day, he always had a narrative “through line” to get back to.

The Cooking Channel’s web site calls The Galloping Gourmet “a U.K. import.” Kerr was a Brit, but the show was made in Toronto.

As many of you know, Kerr’s lived in northwest Washington for the past few decades. He’s become an outspoken evangelist for healthy eating and sustainable, local farming.

The buttery, creamy, high-fat-content entrees he used to make on TV are no longer in his repertoire.

But it’s still fun to watch him making them, via the magic of videotape.

This week has seen two members of the still fledgling Seattle filmmaking community step out of the scrappy milieu of ultra-low-budget indie cinema and into the most formula-driven segment of Hollywood, “episodic” television.

Last Thursday, John Jeffcoat’s warm, subtle dramedy feature Outsourced premiered as a broader, more blatant NBC sitcom.

And on Sunday, Humpday mumblecore auteur Lynn Shelton made her Directors Guild of America debut helming a particularly emotional episode of AMC’s Mad Men.

Reviews for Outsourced the series are mixed at best. Shelton’s Mad Men episode got its full share of the praise that that critics’-darling series has gotten.

Jeffcoat and George Wing, his co-screenwriter on the Outsourced movie, are credited with the screenplay for the Outsourced series pilot episode. But Hollywood producer Robert Borden shepherded the series adaptation.

The simpler, cruder gags and ethnic humor in the show, compared to the original film, could be the work of Borden. But they should more appropriately attributed to the network’s vehicle assembly system, the layers of bureaucracy that turn so many promising shows into mush before they even get a chance.

Reportedly, Jeffcoat and Wing have been retained as consultants on the series. Let’s hope they can help mix in a greater portion of the film’s higher culture-clash content.

Shelton faced the opposite situation.

She was given a script, complete with multiple last-minute rewrites. She was given standing sets, a regular cast and crew, and an established audio-visual vocabulary. She had input on the episode’s new settings and guest actors. She had eight shooting days and a similarly tight editing schedule.

The result was not, by any means, a Lynn Shelton film. It was a regular Mad Men, albeit an especially potent one.

Directing episodic TV is more akin to conducting than to composing. It’s working within a complex set of disciplines and strictures. It is an art in its own right.

“A smart heroin addict is still a heroin addict.”

A Facebook correspondent said that to me, after I rebutted his anti-television screed.

But that’s not what I’m writing about today.

I’m writing to confess something.

Yes, I am an addict.

Specifically, I am addicted to what members of certain online message boards call “stim.”

That’s short for “stimuli.”

In my case, for a broad array of mental/emotional stimuli.

Among many other things, I am addicted to:

• The beat and the chords and the melody of a great pop song.
• The urgency of news headlines, as delivered in any medium.
• The telegraph-inspired urgency of old network radio “news on the hour” themes.
• The scrolling headlines and stock tickers on cable news channels.
• The wild juxtapositions of time/space/narrative in an old newspaper.
• The similar juxtapositions in a well-curated blog.
• The sound of a phonograph needle hitting the scratchy outer groove of a vinyl record.
• The frenetic beauty of a Merrie Melodies cartoon.
• The typography and design of old magazines and newspapers.
• The look and build of an old building, even one that was considered ordinary in its time.
• The all-out attempts at persuasion seen in old advertisements, pamphlets, political badges, and printed pop ephemera of all types.
• The glow of a neon sign; the stasis of its daylight background base.
• The noise, beats, sights, and smells of many industrial processes (including those that were sampled in the Dancer in the Dark soundtrack).
• The poignancy of urban decay, of streets and structures whose once-noble aspirations have faded with time.
• The “instant insight” of a well turned phrase.
• The “gotcha” moment of a particularly awful pun.
• The sight of a female figure, revealed in artistic, alluring, and/or fun ways.
• All of the sounds, touches, tastes, and scents associated with heterosexual pleasure.
• A sugar rush.
• A caffeine rush.
• The sated feeling after a big meal.
• The exotic thrill of a foreign film, particularly a foreign mass-entertainment film. The song-and-dance spectacles of Bollywood, in which generalized sensuality triumphs over sexual prudery. The audacious blare of an Italian “giallo” soundtrack. The milieu of early British Hitchcock films, just foreign enough to unsettle.

Strangely enough, several genres and industries designed wholly around “stim” don’t particularly enthrall me. Casino gambling; modern video games; big budget special effects movies—I just don’t respond to ’em.

I don’t remember attempting to watch a complete episode of As the World Turns before 1969, when KIRO-TV first placed a noon newscast ahead of it. (Ah, Sandy Hill….)

ATWT was a difficult viewing experience for a preteen boy. But I challenged myself to get through it.

First came the gothic organ theme, and that very simple title sequence using a very church-y typeface. (Years later I learned the font was named “Lydian.”) Then a whole minute of commercials.

Only then did the drama commence. It was slow and quiet. It mostly seemed to consist of the Hughes, Lowell, and Stewart family members discussing the everyday minutiae of their lives.

That was all there was to story during the most famous episode of all, the one that Walter Cronkite interrupted for the news that President Kennedy had been shot.

But in retrospect, upon seeing pieces of these old episodes on YouTube, there was a hypnotic formula at work.

ATWT creator Irna Phillips (1903-1973), who’d essentially invented the genre, knew her audiences wanted virtual neighbors, whose lives (just slightly more exciting than the viewers’ own) could be shared in predictable doses at the same time every day, Monday throgh Friday.

Phillips didn’t shout at her viewers with high-strung melodrama. She seduced them with carefully written, if hastily rehearsed, dialogue.

Traditionally soaps were the one TV genre where The Writer was the auteur. ATWT’s auteur was Phillips. It was her masterwork.

It was also one of the first TV soaps to run a half hour per episode. Previously they’d all been 15 minutes, as they’d been on radio.

Phillips took this extra airtime and used it to slow down the storytelling pace, sometimes to near glacial proportions. That only made it more compelling.

ATWT quickly became known as the class act of daytime. Within two years it had conquered the ratings. It stayed on top for two decades.

But it was a show created for the three-network TV economy. The multichannel landscape was a harder place to support a single hour with a reported $50 million annual production budget, producing over 250 episodes a year with no reruns and no DVD box sets. Budgets, casts, and sets got smaller. But those were only stopgap measures.

The last episode has now aired in the west. A story older than me has ended.

Could anything like it be started again?

Yes.

Character-based, quiet, domestic drama is just about the easiest scripted video to produce. It could even be done online, given the right economies of scale.

But this particular story has ended.

It’s a few days late, but CBS.com has finally posted the Letterman segment with author Bill McKibben. (Fast forward to the last 10 minutes of the video.)

Since I am probably the only McKibben reader who continues to own and use a TV set, I got to see this segment on its original air date. He forcefully argues that not only do we have to act to save the planet, but that we can.

Samantha Roddick, owner of a high-end London sex toy shop, on the UK TV miniseries Sex: How to Do Everything:

There are no straight lines in nature.