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No brutal-despair stuff this time; just a more pedestrian advice request.
So far, I’ve carefully spent only tiny portions of my condo-sales proceeds. Most of that has gove to keep the aforementioned credit card people at bay. One chunk went to replace an aging computer. I’ve also attained a few practical wardrobe items and a half-dozen or so practical furnishing pieces for New MISC Towers.
But now I have a craving.
Despite my lifelong respect for the televisual medium, I’ve only owned two TV sets. The first was an old transistor-based Sony Trinitron, which I’d won in a KING-TV giveaway at Northgate Mall. It served my viewing needs from 1975 to 1991, when it finally ceased to function. Then came the 19″ Magnavox I still use today. (Comparitavely, I’ve had six VCRs since 1986.)
I promised myself a few years back that I’d not get another TV until (1) the Magnavox died, or (2) HDTV equipment became affordable. The latter is now almost the case, at least if I keep wtih old CRT technology. Of course, the only HD channels now on my current cable system are the ordinary broadcast channels. Presumably, that will increase (the more dominant cable company in Seattle has eight HD cable channels). HD DVDs will also, presumably, show up one of these years.
Because I believe in long-term hardware investments, if I were to get a set this year it’d have to be HD-ready. But I don’t really need to get one.
So please tell me what to do.
…of the digital media age just might be that onetime symbol of hidebound, bureaucratic broadcasting, the BBC.
Besides his enjoyable, scenery-chompin’ roles on the original Batman, the original Star Trek, The Edge of Night, and many other TV series, I’ll particularly remember him from my all-time favorite never-released-on-home-video movie, the Washington-filmed Ring of Fire.
According to the alt-media conventional wisdom, when TV and radio ratings decline, major-label CD sales slump, and major-studio movie ticket sales stagnate, it’s supposed to be a hopeful omen toward the impending demise of the “dinosaurs.” But when book sales show a similar slump, we’re all supposed to get outraged n’ frightful that those rubes out there in bad ol’ mainstream America aren’t consuming what’s good for ’em.
The truth lies elswhere.
High, low, and middlebrow content throughout the mechanical (print) and analog (broadcast) media have had to make room in the public “mindspace” for these newfangled digital media (Internet, DVDs, video games, et al.). It’ll all sort out eventually, leaving some investors (of time, energy, and/or money) into various of these media prosprous and others forlorn.
The first of the TV wingnuts has fallen. The erudite and formerly funny Dennis Miller, who morphed/whored himself into a Bill O’Reilly clone with a vocabulary, was axed by CNBC (along with the career celebrity-fluffer Tina Brown). Now maybe we can get a little less heat and a little more light with our warmed-over news analysis. Of course, that’s just my opinion, etc. etc.
…believes Disney will inevitably ruin the Muppets.
…to William J. Bell, cocreator (with his talk-show-host wife) of The Young and the Restless.
When the soap began in 1973, some critics called it a daring experiment in adapting the format to a hip young audience. Not quite. Bell, who’d apprenticed under the pioneering soap creator Irna Phillips, had simply added a veneer of Hollywood glamour to a classic daytime-drama formula.
In the show’s early years, its sets were small and dimly lit. This was a throwback to the first TV soaps of the ’50s, whose studios were tiny and whose settings were cheap to the point of abstraction. When Bell invoked the same look on a larger budget, it emphasized the characters and de-emphasized all other visual elements.
Before the show expanded from a half hour to an hour in 1980, its cast had as few as 16 regular characters, almost all of whom belonged to just three families. The hour-long format necessitated larger casts and more complicated plotlines; but Bell still emphasized his traditional themes of romantic and class conflict. He mostly avoided the other soaps’ digressions into espionage, weird/kinky crime, and improbable fantasy.
Bell continued as Y&R‘s head writer into the ’90s, and as its senior executive producer until his death. As fads came and went, the show remained constant to his vision. It remained a low-key, ploddingly-slow affair. (Some episodes would open with a minute-long shot of a woman pacing back and forth in an office, waiting for a phone to ring.) It eschewed flash, noise, hit-song samples, and everything else Those Kids Today were supposed to like.
(It even kept its original theme song, borrowed from a background track in the Stanley Kramer film Bless the Beasts & Children, and which became a top-40 single in ’76 after ABC Sports used it in a profile of Olympic gymnast Nadia Comaneci.)
The reward for Bell’s intransigence: Y&R has been the highest-rated show on US daytime television for more than a decade.
…of HBO’s revisionist Western series Deadwood is accurate? According to one guy, quite a bit, actually.
…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.
