The original Olympic Games were performed naked. The current Athens incarnation of the event has come as close to that as the world’s more conservative broadcasters (i.e., NBC) would allow.

It seems as if Nike and Adidas decreed that all the players they outfitted for the Games, in any sport, would look more like beach volleyball players.

Even the track-and-field women this year are wearing midriff-bearing tops and dorsal-cleavage bottoms. Only the fencing, sailing, equestrian, baseball/softball, and indoor volleyball competitions still involve full attire, and they’re not getting much prime-time air in this country.

The guys are showing off more, too; especially in bicycling and weightlifting, not to mention swimming and diving. Where the men wear longer duds, they’re still tighter duds. Even the men’s basketball uniforms, at least from some countries, are significantly less baggy than the “long shorts” look of today’s NBA.

I happen to like half-naked women, and I don’t mind half-naked men. As I wrote about Seattle Storm player Lauren Jackson, who posed nude for an Australian art-photo mag to promote her appearance with the Aussie women’s basketball squad, athletic nudity represents a wholesome sexiness, a sexiness based on strength and achievement.

(By the way, just how did Australia become the new East Germany, winning medals far out of proportion to its scant population?)

Anyhoo, I’ve been watching with the sound turned to MUTE, switching between NBC, the various NBC-owned cable channels, and CBC. I’ve not followed any particular sports or athletes, but have enjoyed the whole spectacle of the thing. If I had cared about any one particular sport, NBC’s coverage would’ve disappointed me greatly.

The whole shtick about Olympics TV coverage in this country, ever since Roone Arledge formulated it for ABC in the ’60s, has been based on one big contradiction: Try to get the whole country interested in the Games, but assume your viewers don’t necessarily like sports and aren’t particularly interested in any of these esoteric competitions.

So, every four years (then, when the Winter and Summer games were biennially split, every two years), we got hours of human-interest profiles sandwiching minutes of athletic footage. When we were allowed to see the action (tape-delayed and selectively edited), what we saw almost always focused on US players, with the rest of the world pretty darned much ignored.

This time around, NBC seems to be finally starting to get it right, at least in its daytime and cable incarnations. The prime-time shows are still disjointed mish-moshes of whatever somebody’s decided will generate the hottest storylines that day. But the rest of it, scattered around the clock and the cable dial, we’ve gotten to see individual events more or less from start to end (though not in real time). Many of these events have even starred champions from other lands.

On the whole, though, I still prefer CBC’s barer-bones, more direct approach. Of course, CBC covers Olympic-component sports year round, unlike NBC, making its crews and its viewers more familiar with them.

(It’s a shame North American viewers are blocked from viewing the BBC’s streaming online video coverage.)

…it’s frustrating to know so much of the world’s televisual history’s been lost, especially from the pre-videotape era. But one guy in London successfully made hundreds of thousands of quality still photographs of programs from that era. Alas, most of those “Tele-Snaps” are also missing, presumed scrapped.

…opening ceremony live on CBC (one more reason Canada’s a cooler place). The thing’s a big, gaudy, lovely performance-art spectacle (think Cirque du Soleil) with gods, lovers, classical art, philosophy, history, and huge nude male sculptures.

The celebration of Greek history within the show, like most accounts of that proud nation, lingered on the ancient/classical days and rushed through everything since. As the ceremony’s parade of live tableaux depicted it, the fall of Greek creativity didn’t stem from the Romans’ conquest but from the rise of that late-Roman religion, Christianity.

PS: Yeah, the original Olympic athletes were all male and naked. But there were even more differences between then and now; some of which involved the eternal contradiction between democratic ideals and slavery.

ABC News Now, channel 114 on Seattle Comcast digital cable.

It’s cable news version 4.0. It’s not trying (yet) to compete for ratings against CNN, Fox, or CNBC/MSNBC. It’s there to give ABC an outlet for long-form coverage of live events without breaking into the main network’s entertainment schedule, and to repurpose the network’s vast archive of interviews and magazine-show segments.

It launched last month with the Democratic convention. Now we get to see its regular schedule. It’s a simple, almost-no-nonsense format. A few original shows throughout the day (such as Inside the Newsroom, where reporters in their shirtsleeves discuss the day’s ongoing events). News briefs at the top of the hour. Clips from recent editions of World News Tonight, Good Morning America, Nightline, 20/20, PrimeTime, and This Week. Simple graphics with no headline “tickers.”

And unfiltered, unedited speeches and testimony by political figures. Some of these are similar to C-SPAN events, covered by the same camera pools. But they can still be quite fascinating.

Today I saw Kerry at a Las Vegas middle school, deftly handling questions about educational funding, public transportation, and the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste dump. He behaved as a thorough professional, shaking hands firmly and giving solid eye contact.

Last night I saw Bush at a Virginia community college, mumbling something about schooling as being vital to the growth in American jobs. His incoherence without a script and his nervous body language made him look like he wanted nothing more than to get the heck outta there and back making deals with big contributors.

ABC only promises to keep ABC News Now going through Election Day. I hope it becomes a permanent fixture. Like a less-snide version of its overnight show World News Now, it’s the work of a bigtime news organization getting to play with a low-budget, low-profile outlet.

YEP, IT’S TIME for our annual “In Praise of the Hydros” piece.

Since many of you have read some, if not all, of our previous installments on this topic, this year’s version will be short. Essentially, the hydroplane race is perhaps the most “unique” (to use an overrated LA term) cultural institution Seattle’s still got. Over a quarter-million people gathered on Sunday to watch a sport that exists one week a year here, and is barely noticed anywhere else. KIRO-TV paid a big rights fee to telecast the event, in a seven-hour marathon broadcast utilizing all the hi-tech tricks available to the industry. Advertisers ranging from GM to Mike’s Hard Lemonade commissioned special commercials for the telecast.

Yet, for all its enduring popularity, this may have been the last hydro race as we know it.

To explain why takes a little back-story.

Since the ’80s, the hydro racing circuit was dominated by the Miss Budweiser team, owned by Bernie Little. Anheuser-Busch poured healthy portions of its national ad budget into Little’s operation, as a thank-you for Little’s success as a Bud regional wholesaler. The sport became less and less competitive, especially after other big sponsors (Atlas Van Lines, Procter & Gamble, Kellogg’s) bugged out. As the circuit deteriorated in popularity everywhere except Seattle, Little bought out the whole operation under the name Hydro-Prop.

Little passed away last year. His son took over the Miss Bud team. But soon thereafter, Anheuser-Busch announced it would stop sponsoring the boat after this season.

Hydro-Prop is now in organizational shambles. Little’s heirs haven’t found a new sponsor. Some observers are suggesting the sport physically rebuild itself from scratch, replacing the surplus airplane engines it’s always used with more modern automobile-based engines. And the better-organized Unlimited Lights organization threatens to build its own set of bigger boats, rivaling the “unlimiteds” of Hydro-Prop.

But no matter what happens in the coming years, the 54-year heritage of the hydros will remain an integral (and fun) part of Seattle’s civic psyche.

…has been felled the past 24 hours or so by a brief but nasty stomach bug. You don’t want to hear any more details; trust me. But I will say I tried to heal myself this afternoon by listening to an audio book by Vancouver new-age guru Eckhart Tolle about overcoming “the Pain-Body.” It didn’t work.

WHAT ALSO DIDN’T WORK: The traditional “bounce” in the opinion polls for a Presidential candidate after his nominating convention. Some polls showed little increase in John Kerry’s standing; others even showed him dropping a bit against Bush.

Why? For one thing, the convention’s TV coverage was divvied up into three dosages. The un-spun, uninterrupted coverage on PBS and C-SPAN was probably viewed mainly by political wonks such as myself. More apathetic viewers might have stuck with the measly three hours on the traditional Big Three networks, which contained only the big-name speeches and a lot of pundit-blather. In between these extremes, the three main cable “news” channels gave all-day coverage to their own (mostly Republican-leaning) commentators bashing what the Democrats were saying, with only brief cutaways to what the Democrats actually had said.

I must admit, though, that the Dems’ convention was a tuff thing to slog through in undiluted form. It was produced by a producer of TV awards shows, and felt just as long, dull, and self-serving as some of those shows are.

And, in keeping with a topic I’ve been researching of late, it relentlessly expressed a “positive” attitude. Very little speech-time was spent dissing what I believe is the worst US President since Harding; a sniveling suckup to looters and polluters who’s made this country less free and the world less safe. Instead, speaker after speaker (including, in short spots well out of prime time, our own Gov. Gary Locke and Rep. Adam Smith) recited the DNC-approved buzzwords about hope, help, strength, and respect. The effort throughout was to plug John Kerry as someone to vote for; not simply, as The Daily Show said in a fake campaign commercial, “Not George W. Bush.”

The problem with this strategy is it fits right in with the Bushies’ strategy—to make Kerry’s unproven qualities, not Bush’s proven failings, the chief topic of the proverbial horse race.

But there’s another front in this particular battle. The “527s,” independent progressive groups funded by the likes of George Soros and various Hollywood/Silicon Valley moguls, have gone where the timid Dem leadership won’t. Because these groups officially don’t work for any campaign, they can raise all the money they can to spread their messages. And because they’re not controlled by party bosses, they can tell the harsh truths in their ads. The big 527s (named for the tax-code line that defines them) include the famous Move On, Americans Coming Together, Howard Dean’s Democracy for America, and even Punk Voter.

Besides these fairly well-funded efforts, there are more thoroughly grassroots anti-Bush outfits as well, such as Seattle’s own “No Vote Left Behind.”

Then there’s the semi-satirical F___ the Vote, which asks “sexy liberals,” especially in the undecided “swinger states” (including Washington), to seduce and convert conservatives. Its home page claims, “Everyone knows liberals are hotter than conservatives—we look hotter, we dress hotter, our ideas are hotter, and we are infinitely hotter in the sack. We must use our sexual appeal to our advantage, as one more weapon in our already diverse arsenal.”

At last—a campaign tactic I can fully support. Sign me up today. I’ll show any Bellevue divorcee or Wenatchee church matron the road to a better tomorrow, metaphorically paved with multiple orgasms.

IN OTHER COMING-TOGETHER NEWS, a Seattle judge has ruled in favor of same-sex marriages. The case immediately goes to the State Supreme Court; there’ll be no official gay/lesbian nuptials ’til that court decides.

AND BY THE WAY, I’m feeling much better now. Sitting down to write always helps my energy level. So did the Hi-NRG music mix I’ve got on my iTunes right now—Serge Gainsbourg, game-show themes, Nina Simone, Petula Clark, Blondie, and more. I’m a word guy, but sometimes music can do much more for me than words.

FRIDAY NIGHT was a night of triumph for local writer and former zine editor Steve Mandich.

TNT debuted its new Evel Knievel made-for-cable movie, officially based on Mandich’s now-out-of-print book Evel Incarnate. He held a party for some 50 friends and relatives, plus me, at Goofy’s sports bar in Ballard. He’s shown above in a custom Evel suit, which he asked well-wishers to autograph.

Mandich says he didn’t ask for any input in the making of the movie (“I just took their check and deposited it”), and invited his audience to laugh or make snide remarks about it.

It turned out to be a competent if un-stirring biopic, more entertaining than the two ’70s Knievel films (one starring the man himself, the other with George Hamilton). I particularly enjoyed the obviously fake digital paintings of the Las Vegas skyline, which utterly failed to hide the fact that the whole thing was filmed in Ontario.

Seattle attorney Greg Narver, brother of Empty Space Theater co-boss Allison Narver, got to be one of Ken Jennings’s 62-and-counting Jeopardy! slaughter victims on the episode shown Wednesday. (By the way, you might have noticed a lot of John Kerry commercials airing in local ad slots on J!, while Bush ads seem ubiquitous on sports and “reality” shows.)

…how TV news will survive in a postmodern world; implying that American journalism as we know it has been embedded in an old-style “modern” zeitgeist.

Bainbridge Island preservationists are up in arms over rumors claiming Jennifer Aniston and hubby Brad Pitt might move into one of the island’s multimillion-dollar “cabins,” thus turning the ferry suburb into a lala land affordable only by celebrities (instead of the lawyers and software execs crowding the place now).

If she finds a lousy reception here, maybe Aniston could still move to an island–the mysterious supervillain island where her soap-star dad is currently holed up.

BusinessWeek has proclaimed the death of the “Mass Market” in the U.S.

With the rise of tertiary cable channels, ultra-specialized magazines (my current fave: Physicians’ Travel), and the Web, advertisers are increasingly moving to media that target specific audiences. Caught in the resulting fiscal death spiral: Network TV, local TV, and daily papers.

Perhaps you won’t miss the days when half the country watched the same sitcoms, and 80 percent of households received “the paper” (typically a dully-written, Republican-partisan sheet) every day.

But if Procter & Gamble or General Motors wishes to no longer support general-interest journalism, who will? Not web ads, not sufficiently, at least not yet.

A lot of us lefties have had our beefs against the news coverage from the networks and the daily papers this past year and a half. To a great extent, the big media’s superficial, authority-driven war coverage was driven by the twin drives to keep costs down and to gain readers/viewers with spectacular stories/images. Thus, the mania in 2003 for “embedded” reporters, who got to cover the war up close as long as they saw and said what the White House wanted them to see and say. Undercover, investigative stuff is much more labor intensive, and doesn’t guarantee any flashy payoff.

As a long-term-unemployed journalist myself (will someone out there please hire me please?), I’ve seen the long-term effects of this shift in ad support. It’s undoubtedly the real reason the Seattle Times wants to end its joint operating agreement with the Post-Intelligencer. It’s the real reason chain-owned radio stations are decimating their news departments, and national magazines are buying fewer freelance articles. It’s a trend that won’t be fully reversed even when the general economy improves.

So what’ll save quality news in the U.S.? Pledge drives? Church subsidies? Foreign imports?

I haven’t the answers. If you have, lemme know.

…just keeps getting shriller and dumber. Now, a prowar outfit is trying to pressure movie theaters into not showing Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

A quick Net check shows this group is led by one Howard Kaloogian. He recently ran for a US Senate seat in California, on an anti-immigration, anti-environmental, anti-abortion, anti-gay, pro-weapons platform. He also played some part in the gubernatorial recall campaign that put Schwarzenegger in the state house down there; other recall advocates allege he siphoned contributions from the recall drive to put into his own campaign.

Another principal in the drive is a Calif. campaign operative and former Reagan advisor named Sal Russo. Kaloogian and Russo previously co-ran the successful campaign to stop CBS from airing its Reagans miniseries.

As Frederick Sweet writes, the anti-Moore drive is no grassroots support-our-troops campaign but a smear tactic from high GOP sources. “The Bush Republicans are trying very hard to stop Americans from seeing Michael Moore’s movie. They are also trying to hide the fact that their campaign is attempting to smear Moore and pressure theater owners into not running his movie. Hopefully, the Republicans’ censorship and intimidation will fail and millions of Americans will soon learn how George Bush had a business relationship with the Bin Laden family. They will learn this just before the next presidential election.”

The Lucking Fakers were thoroughly trounced. The mighty Detroit Pistons, a real basketball team (as opposed to an overpaid, overhyped bunch of divas) handily won the basketball championship Tuesday night.

The victory was a mighty blow for all that is right and good in America, and a slap against the NBA’s powers-that-be and its “broadcast partners” (ABC, ESPN, TNT). In the post-Jordan era, the league and the networks have conspired to treat the Lucking Fakers as The Team That Deserves Everything, The Team You MUST Love. All 29 other squads received as much combined respect as the Harlem Globetrotters’ sham opponents.

Back during the regular season, TNT could barely bother even covering game one of its weekly doubleheaders; instead, the channel spent two and a half hours plugging the Lucking Fakers’ forthcoming appearance in game two.

In the playoffs, the national print media joined the broadcasters in predicting a Lucking Fakers walkoff. Sure, the Pistons had more teamwork, more energy, and more balance, but they didn’t have more endorsement deals!

So the Pistons’ victory, not just by an edge but by a trounce, proves that there’s still room for sports in American sports.

I really, really want light entertainment programming to be a permanent part of the local Seattle TV scene, which it hasn’t been for more than two years.

So I wanted KIRO’s Star Search Seattle to be a smash.

Alas, it’s a dud.

The original Star Search format, as you may recall from the old Ed McMahon series, would be a natural for a talent-rich town such as ours. It mixed singers, dancers, comedians, “spokesmodels,” and other performance categories, in simple one-on-one competitions before celebrity judges. The recent CBS network revival featured four categories.

Instead, Star Search Seattle depicted only one performance genre—karaoke singing.

In six one-hour episodes, a total of 36 amateur and semipro vocalists belted their way through various ’70s-soul moldies and office-radio-station ballads, to the accompaniment of canned backing tracks. In one nod to the original, the singers were judged two at a time. The pairings weren’t the fairest—decent song-stylists often faced off against one another, and pathetic wannabes often competed against other pathetic wannabes.

To their credit, the judges (Mr. President Chris Ballew, record producer Glenn Lorbiecki, and local DJs Lisa Foster and Mitch Elliott) never insulted the contestants, but gave kind and constructive criticism. (I still don’t know why Ballew and Lorbiecki each had one vote in the judging, while Foster and Elliott had to split a vote.)

Anyhoo, you’ve one more chance to see the show, such as it is. The big season finale will be telecast live at 8 p.m. this Friday (6/18/04), originating from the Clearwater Casino (the series’ main sponsor, as noted, ’50s-game-show style, by logos decorating the studio set of the preliminary episodes).

And the station’s promising a second season sometime. I hope next time they’ll dump the American Idol aping and embrace the something-for-everyone format of the original Star Search.

Indeed, I could envision new genre categories for a Seattle talent competition. Slam poetry, of course, but also DJ-ing (in turntable and laptop divisions), conceptual/performance art, and even musical performances that include the playing of actual instruments.

Today, some web links recalling the monstrous politics behind the happy-face mask.

• Dan Modela discusses Dark Victory, his book investigating Reagan’s lifelong ties to MCA, former parent company of Universal Studios and the most notoriously Mob-connected company in Hollywood. (Universal’s now being acquired by GE, which once sponsored a TV show Reagan hosted and MCA produced.)
• Third World Traveler has links to several accounts of Reagan’s disastrous foreign policies, includng his luuuvvv for dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere. (Among Ronnie’s enamored: Saddam, Osama, and Pinochet.)
• Mark Hertsgaard, in a 1996 interview, mentions how Reagan was given virtually free rein by a submissive Washington press corps.
• David Swanson remembers the secret Iran-hostage deal that gained Reagan the White House in the first place.
• William Rivers Pitt insists that ” virtually every significant problem facing the American people today can be traced back to the policies and people that came from the Reagan administration. It is a laundry list of ills, woes and disasters that has all of us, once again, staring apocalypse in the eye.”
• David Corn, in a 1998 Nation essay, recalls “66 (Unflattering) Things About Ronald Reagan.”
• And Greg Palast emphatically recalls Reagan as “a conman” and “a coward.”
• But Madison, WI’s Capital Times asserts that progressives oughta learn from Reagan’s “willingness to fight for his faith.”