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Utne Reader has discovered Seattle Sound’s item about an online sub-sub-genre of “slash fiction,” this version involving the likes of Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl, among other bad-boy duos of rock.
“Slash” fiction, for the uninitiated, is a four-decades-old shtick in which mostly female writers imagine guy-pals of celebrity or fiction as if they were hot n’ heavy gay lovers. Most observers believe it started with Star Trek fan fiction.
I’d go back earlier, to the college English profs who’d give an easy A to any student essay that “proved” the major characters of any major literary work were really gay.
Cobain, as many of you know, sometimes claimed to be bi; though there’s no knowledge of his ever having had a homosexual experience. I used to figure he’d just said that because, in Aberdeen, to be a “fag” was the worst insult you could give a boy, while in Olympia and Seattle, upscale white gay men were the most respected “minority group” around.
Fiction based on real-life celebrity caricatures is also nothing new. The New Yorker did it in the 1930s. South Park has been doing it for a decade.
Anyhow, there are further slash frontiers out there than Seattle Sound or Utne have bothered to explore. They include “femslash,” women writing about female fictional icons as if they were really lesbians. It might have started with fan-written stories about Xena and Gabrielle. It’s spread to include other SF/fantasy shows with at least two female cast members, and from there to other fictional universes. The grossest/most intriguing, depending on your tastes, might be the stories imagining half-sisterly cravings between Erica Kane’s daughters.
KOMO-TV’s long-running afternoon talk show will disappear in August, ending a 24-year run.
Producers had tried to shake up the show in recent years, slicing it into four or five segments per hour instead of its traditional two. But the lure of low-cost, high-profit syndicated talk fare has finally done it in, just like it’s done in most of the local gabfests around the country.
Also threatened by the dictum of talk-is-cheap: The daytime soap operas, which NWA cohost Cindi Rinehart has chronicled since the show’s debut. At that time, there were 14 daily serials on American TV. Now there are just eight (not counting Spanish-language imports). Almost all of those shows are scrambling to cut their budgets and shrink their acting and writing staffs.
In the ultimate unintended irony, the syndicated show that will replace Rinehart and co. has the same title as a former long-running soap, The Doctors.
Everyone knows the “fist bump” gesture was invented by Howie Mandel!
…hits Ed McMahon. It might take a miracle to keep him housed; either that, or winning a magazine sweepstakes.
Another TV season has come and gone. Ratings across the channel spectrum continued to plummet, even on shows/channels that weren’t hit by the writers’ strike.
And with the explosion in programming across broadcast and cable channels, telecasters are constantly on the lookout for entertainment forms that haven’t yet been adapted to the screen.
Saturday Night Live, as you’ll recall, was born from trends in stage sketch comedy that hadn’t yet been brought to TV on a regular basis.
Later years brought us televised karaoke, poker, ballroom dancing, shows based on video blogs and webcams, travelogue shows at pubilc-drunkenness events, and even prime-time bingo.
So: What else is out there, to feed programmers’ ravenous appetites for stealable concepts?
Here are a few ideas. (If any readers successfully package a series based on one of these, you may pay me a modest royalty.)
Please feel free to suggest your own.
…to settle in for an all-day, most-of-the-night cable viewing marathon. The AP went and spoiled it all by calling it for Obama this morning. Now I don’t know what to do with my day. Perhaps I’ll go hang out at the library and re-read the old bound volumes of The Saturday Evening Post.
Now the Great Gazoo will never get back to his home planet.
Broadstripe (formerly Millennium, formerly Summit, formerly Seacom), the “little” cable company with a big image problem, has finally added a bunch more hi-def channels. They’re all versions of brands you know and love—TNT, TBS, A&E, History Channel, National Geographic, Lifetime Movie Network, and (for a little extra) Showtime.
So far, so good. We get TNT’s NBA playoffs (including, alas, the Lucking Fakers) and TBS’s baseball games (no longer exclusively starring the Braves) in their full-res, widescreen glory. The same goes for some movies, recent off-network reruns (Lawn Order: Assorted Flavors), and “reality” faves such as Ax Men (northwest Oregon never looked so beautifully foreboding).
But, and this is something Broadstripe can do nothing about, sometimes these channels aren’t showing HD material. (This is usually when they’re simulcasting the same shows as their famous parent channels.) That would only be a minor annoyance, except these channels then ruin this material by altering it into that fake-widescreen stretch-O-vision. Sometimes, even movies that were originally made in widescreen will get cropped and then stretched into unviewability. And you can’t “squeeze” it back into its proper proportions; you can only search out these shows on the channels’ regular standard-def incarnations.
The worst offender: Lifetime Movie Network, whose shelves of moldering ’80s-’90s made-for-TV victimization-and-revenge tales are almost all stretched out like digital Silly Putty comics.
After last night’s televised debacle (the debacle part being mostly the doing of the televisors), one question remains (out of all the many questions left unasked): Were messers Gibson and Stephanopoulos playing devil’s advocate, or are they really sniveling GOP sycophants?
Saturday just happened to be the first warm day of the year; a perfect setting for the already much-documented Dalai Lama show in the pro football stadium, where he talked about compassion and coexistence for all people.
(No, I see absolutely no cynical irony in that. American football is a game of confrontation, but it’s also a game of cooperation.)
His message, and the other messages at the Seeds of Compassion confab, have been both simple and deep. I’ll probably have more to say about them later this week.
Later that evening, I found myself at the Georgetown Art Attack gallery crawl. Saw some lovely informal paintings at Georgetown Tile curated by my ol’ pal Anne Grgich; then caught some great buys at the Fantagraphics bookstore’s scratch-and-dent sale.
Sunday brought us the last day of the last bowling alley north of the Ship Canal, Ballard’s totally beloved Sunset Lanes.
It was also the day of what just might have been the last pro basketball game in Seattle. Maybe. If we don’t do something about it.
Even after a deliberately thrown season, the finale was sold out. Fans booed the home team’s owner Clay Bennett, and cheered the opposing team’s owner (Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks, who opposes Bennett’s desired team move to Oklahoma City). You saw little to none of this on Fox Sports Net; under terms of its contract with the team, FSN’s announcers said almost nothing about Bennett’s threats or the real importance of Sunday’s game.
Also Sunday evening, and this takes the whole entry full circle, CNN held what it called a “Compassion Forum,” in which Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (appearing separately) discussed their religious and/or spiritual foundations. Of course, because they are rival applicants for a really big job, some pundits just had to compare and contrast who’s really the most faith-based.
From episode one, he was juxtaposing New York export culture (TV shows and commercials) with New York local culture (particularly off-Broadway revues). For one of the world’s biggest media companies, Michaels simulated a small, funky, fringe-theater experience. Broadway theater set designer Eugene Lee divided the huge Studio 8H into a series of intimate, textured living rooms and offices; they looked like places where Gleason and Carney could have cavorted. Bob Pook’s cute sketch title cards and Edie Baskin’s hand-colored cast photos furthere the notion that this was no Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. This would be a different type of TV, a show viewers could trust to speak their language, even when that language became a stream of catch phrases.
This affect spread to the musical guests. In the show’s launch, they were almost always mellow singer-songwriters and aging R&B legends. Michaels clearly didn’t know what to do with ABBA (who were cast over his dead body by network bosses) and Elvis Costello. He preferred nice music by people with genuine Sixties-generation cred.
Even the Muppets’ ongoing “Dregs and Vestiges” skits were really about the decline of the previous decade’s dreams. Ugly monster characters exchanged shticks about sex, drugs, and decay, on a planet whose good years were long past.
This was the setting, the picture frame for SNL’s comedy, a brand of comedy that was simultaneously brutal and gentle, experimental and commercial.
In time, of course, the commercial side would become ascendant. When Michaels returned to the show in 1986 after six seasons away, he re-created it as an “Industry” show, one where celebrities would be worshipped even as they were mocked.
…another 7 daze since I last posted. Excuses: Got none. (Except that a startup entrepreneurial venture I’d been involved with this past year seems to have gone “on hold.”)
In the nooze recently:
…couple-O-daze for yr. o’b’d’n’t web-scribe. I did a marathon temp gig in exotic Renton. (It’s now ended.) I was there, methodically shoving pieces of paper through a machine, when my Evening Magazine segment aired. (They’d promised they’d tell me when it would run; damn.) You may be able to see it at this link.
Other things have happened as well.
…I’m skipping the morning-headlines thang on days when there’s not much interesting to pass on. Today, we’ve got a few items:
…rolls along, even into primary states. Elsewhere:
