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…to Dale Messick, the Brenda Starr creator and the only (then) living cartoonist to get a commemorative U.S. postage stamp, and to Debralee Scott, the love-frustrated kid sister on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.
I’ve put down a deposit on an apartment back in my former stompin’ grounds of Belltown. It’s large, moderately priced, close to everything, and has tall ceilings and a great view.
It’s also got Millennium Digital Media, Seattle’s “other” cable company. It’s the successor to Summit Cable, which was formed in the late ’80s to bid on a service area consisting of neighborhoods neglected by the two other cable providers here at the time. Those other two firms since merged and are now Comcast.
These days, Millennium offers a similar group of packages to Comcast’s, including broadband Internet and (soon) phone service. But its digital cable tiers are a bit paltry in comparison to the hunkin heap o’ pixels Comcast throws at ya. Here are some of the digital and/or basic channels Comcast offers but Millennium doesn’t (and which I’ve watched at least once so far this year):
In addition, you can only get the Sundance Channel on Millennium if you buy Showtime.
Then there’s the whole On Demand thang, which is vast on Comcast and as yet nonextant on Millennium.
Yes, I’m feeling buyer’s remorse. Can ya tell?
Saw what was billed as the “season finale” of HBO’s damnedest-thing-you-ever-saw drama Carnivale. The pay channel seemed reluctant to commission even a second season, so it’s anybody’s guess whether there’ll be a third. Enough plot threads and hints were left at the end to make the basis of more episodes. Yet enough plot threads were resolved that it could have also been the official series finale.
HBO deliberately scheduled Carnivale‘s second season so the 12th and last episode, billed as “the ultimate battle between good and evil,” would air on Easter. And sure enough, it had at least one character (possibly) coming back to life, along with some grisly deaths, a good character turning evil, and a lot of subtext about the Goodness of grisly showbiz types (the 1930s traveling carnival/freak-show people, as possible metaphors for the filmmakers or uncensored cable channels) and the Badness of the forces of repression (the secretly demonic Fundamentalist revival preacher, as a possible metaphor for America’s current religious-political regime).
The show has a very ’90s David Lynch feel to it, and not just because Michael J. Anderson (the Man From Another Place on Twin Peaks) plays the carnival’s boss. It’s full of art, violence, and the seedy underside of nostalgic small-town America. Its sideshow milieu appeals to a ’90s Seattle art-culture aesthetic of the Jim Rose/Moe’s nightclub era. And it’s more chock full of religious/mystical/paranormal secrets and legends (both historic and made-up) than The Da Vinci Code.
Carnivale is delicious epic entertainment, but it will probably work better in DVD form, where viewers can re-view scenes and try to figure out the complex layers of symbolism.
Seattle’s greatest gift to kiddie TV has a new show! The Eyes of Nye starts in April on KCTS. (Too bad it’s at the same time as CBC’s airings of the new Doctor Who.)
I’VE GOT A REPORT in the current North Seattle Sun about the Seattle cable access channel’s latest attempts to rein in the porn-compilation series Mike Hunt TV.
The all-new, slicked-up revival of Doctor Who will premiere on April 5 on CBC. Nerds in non-border US regions, though, will have to wait a little longer to see it, perhaps a lot longer.
…gets any older than it already is, I’ve gotta run down the Kim Warnick retierment roast last Sunday night at Neumo’s.
The 22-year Fastbacks singer-bassist, and more recent Visqueen sidewoman, announced she’s giving up the music-biz grind. Some longtime pals, particularly promoter (and Warnick’s fellow ex-Sub Pop office drone) Kerri Harrop, staged the big shindig to mark Warnick’s long service to the local and global music community.
The event was emceed by former local TV phenom John Keister. He’s apparently spent at least part of the past four years in low-rent exile in Ellensburg. He also looked as if he’d been eating very well lately. He opened with a short monologue about the Seattle music scene, or what passed for it, at the time Warnick began playing—one or two midweek club nights at bars that normally catered to the leather crowd.
Warnick’s father showed up, told his own Dean Martin-style roast jokes, including one in which he referred to the Fastbacks’ most famous touring partners as “Strawberry Jam.” He then narrated a slide show of Kim’s peaceful childhood years in north Seattle.
A succession of other ol’ pals (including Joe Meece from the Meeces, Dave Rosencranz from Sub Pop, and Visqueen leader Rachel Flotard) then took turns on the podium with anecdotes about wacky experiences on tour, in practice, and at day jobs with Warnick, and about her philosophy of life (“ALWAYS make your bed in the morning”).
Warnick’s longtime stage fraternal twin, Fastbacks songwriter-guitarist Kurt Bloch, attended the event but didn’t speak live. Instead, he and the band’s third permanent member, Lulu Gargiulo, appeared in a pre-made video projection, singing Fastbacks songs without Warnick’s vocals and starting but never finishing funny tour stories. (Gargiulo must have a Dorian Gray-esque painting of herself at home, ‘cuz she’s hardly aged a day in the past quarter century.)
That was one of several video segments interspersed through the night, including two vintage Fastbacks music videos from the early ’90s. (One day, we’re going to have to tell our perplexed grandchildren what “music videos” were. They’re fast becoming a scarce commodity, even on the TV channels created to show them.)
All in all, it was a quite pleasant and entertaining evening. Those of us who’d listened to Warnick’s music-making since the bitter start had a wunnerful, wunnerful time reminiscing about the (not necessarily “good,” but fun) old days.
…and I haven’t posted a remembrance of that potenially silliest of all silly dot-com-era hustle concepts, MarchFirst.com.
It was a merger of two web-design and online-services companies, which themselves were the results of several prior mergers. It was named after the date in 2000 in which the merger documents were signed.
The combined company boasted more than 5,000 employees, doing many different things on behalf of other companies. But MarchFirst’s preeminent claim was that it would help corporate clients build their Internet presences from scratch. Just one call to the Chicago-based MarchFirst, and your firm would instantly turn from an old-economy dinosaur into a new-economy powerhouse, right up there with such rising behemoths as Pets.com and Flooz.com.
None of this, however, was mentioned in the company’s costly TV ads. Most infamously, it bought naming rights for NBA halftime shows on NBC. “Coming up next: MarchFirst At the Half! Presented by MarchFIrst, where it’s all about ‘The Importance of Being First,’ at www-dot-MarchFirst-dot-com!” The commercials that aired within these halftimes were sentimental things, with gauze-filtered cameras and soft-rock music, in which a syrupy narrator talked about such feats as the first manned space flight and the first four-minute mile, and then simply reiterated the “Importance of Being First” slogan. Nary a word was given to what the heck MarchFirst was or what the heck it did.
For a company whose principal premise was helping other companies market themselves, it sure did a lousy job of marketing itself.
Within 14 months of its formation, it declared bankruptcy. Now, the URL points only to a claims site for ex-employees who were bilked out of their health benefits.
The “world’s best fast food stops” are probably not simply off-model outlets of otherwise standardized chains.
I just got my first check from my father’s life insurance policy, which means I can placate my creditors for a little while. I’m in line for a couple of potentially mid-paying jobs. And there’s women’s curling on CBC today! Life is good.
PBS ASKS, is there a Pacific Northwest accent? (Found by Slumberland.)
…John Bradshaw on the Family on the Wisdom channel. Bradshaw’s lecture series, originally made for PBS in 1985, discusses family dysfunction as a pivot point for just about everything that goes wrong with individuals and societies: “Any time you’re not your true self, you can be taken.”
Among his points: If you know how people from non-nurturing families come to think, you can manipulate them very brutally. He cited a couple of authors, including Alice Miller, who’d seen the horrors of Hitlerism in ol’ Adolf’s own ultra-authoritarian childhood family, and in the more general hierarchical, patriarchal, and anti-freedom nature of typical German family structures.
Now I finally know why the most anti-life, anti-freedom, anti-environmental, anti-equality, anti-gay, anti-women, anti-children, anti-sex, and pro-violence forces in the US use “The Family” as their ideological excuse and stick the name “Family” in the names of their propaganda groups.
…the Rocklopedia Fakebandica, which claims to be the ultimate authority on fictional rock bands in movies and TV shows, doesn’t just include the obvious entries such as Spinal Tap or Jem and the Holograms. It even has the Beets (from the cartoon Doug), Lenny and the Squigtones (from Laverne & Shirley), and the notorious ’60s would-be hipster film The Phynx!
…today to veteran actress Ruth Warrick, whose career span ranged from Citizen Kane to Erica Kane.
…the stick-in-your-head ad jingle?
