THE HYDRO RACES went off flawlessly. Alas, so did the near-annual coronation of Miss Budweiser, the 5,000-lb. gorilla of the sport.

Still, it was a great afternoon of noise, sunburns, partying, and debauchery. And the power boats themselves still express the union of some eternal dichotomies: The sky and the sea, power and beauty, triumph and frustration.

WHILE WE ATTEMPT to get our lovely main digicam either fixed or replaced, we’ve got a backlog of dozens of cool pix taken on it. They’ll appear on this site at the usual erratic frequency.

A new Jack in the Box commercial begins with the guy in a plastic clown head (allegedly voiced by Matt Frewer) in a damp, dark forest setting, in front of a crew of dingy, ponytailed hackey-sack players. As the rain beads up on his plastic face, he announces the fast food chain’s new “Northwest chicken salad.” Halfway through the ad copy, the clown realizes a mistake. Cut to a cue-card holder who says “Sorry dude.” Cut to a hastily revised cue card now reading “Southwest chicken salad.” Instantly the scene changes to a bright, sunny playa. Instead of the hackey-sackers, there’s an energetic marimba band.

This is no way for the San Diego, CA-based chain to treat our region. First they kill some of us, then they insult us.

…to New Kids on the Block action figures, here’s a site with dozens of your fave ’80s commercials.

Oregon State U. prof Jon Lewis’s book Hollywood V. Hard Core, now out in paperback, claims the Hollywood studios aren’t and weren’t the free-speech crusaders they sometimes claimed to be. Lewis argues, according to the book’s back-cover blurb, that the studio-imposed ratings system and other industry manipulations served to crush the ’60s-’70s craze for sex films and art films, and thus “allowed Hollywood to consolidate its iron grip over what movies got made and where they were shown.”

When the Independent Film Channel runs its salute next month to “renegade” type filmmakers of the ’70s, you can compare and contrast IFC’s take on the era with that of Lewis. IFC, I suspect, may describe ’70s cinema as a freewheeling revolutionary era, whose rule-breakin’ bad boys took over the biz and are still among today’s big movers-n’-shakers.

I’d give an interpretation closer to Lewis’s. That’s because I essentially came of age at the height of ’70s cinemania. My early college years (including one year at OSU) coincided with the likes of Cousin Cousine, Swept Away, The Story of O, All the President’s Men, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, Dawn of the Dead, Days of Heaven, Manhattan, Being There, Rock n’ Roll High School, Emmanuelle 2, and countless other classics that forever shaped my worldview.

But that was, to quote a film of the era, “before the dark time. Before the Empire.”

Lucas and Spielberg, those clever studio-system players who let themselves be marketed as mavericks, re-taught the studios how to make commercial formula movies. Before long, they and their imitators became the new kings of the jungle. Francis Coppola, Alan Rudolph, Richard Rush, Terrence Malick, and other medium-expanders were shunted to the sidelines of the biz.

The sorry results can be surveyed on any episode of Entertainment Tonight.

In related news, an alliance of Net-radio entrepreneurs is planning to sue the record industry, claiming the major labels have set royalty rates so high only big corporate stations can afford to legally exist….

…And Jeff Chester of TomPaine.com interprets Comcast’s lastest cable-contract wrangling in Calif. as a scheme to kill public access channels. I don’t think Chester’s allegation’s fully supported by the evidence he gives, but the situation’s still one to watch with concern.

Unreachable Zone of Darkness, a particularly grim family-treachery soap opera from Hong Kong currently running weekday mornings on the International Channel. It’s in Cantonese only (no subtitles), but you don’t need to know what the characters are saying to understand the general mood of delicious backbiting and vengeance.

HERE’S HOW Fark summarized this KOMO-TV report about Boeing’s latest job-blackmail shenanigans: “Washington State approves $3 billion tax cut for Boeing. Boeing responds by laying off more workers.”

Need more be said?

Actually, at least a little more.

The company that, as much as any, made modern global business possible insists upon re-imaging itself as a global-age enterprise, no matter how costly or inefficient the move may turn out to be. Management is out to permanently eliminate as much of the old Boeing culture of middle-class American working-stiff stability as possible. The 7E7 assembly line, for which Washington’s politicians would sell all our souls, would only employ as few as 800 people. Big components and subassemblies, even the all-important wing work, will be parceled out to subcontractors, non-union states, sweatshop countries, and nations whose government-owned airlines might consider buying a couple of the finished planes.

There comes a point when a state’s just gotta say it won’t play the coddle-the-CEO game over such low payoffs. Let’s hope in this state it’s soon.

This short item will start out as an observation and end with an appeal.

Within the past month, four or five different acquaintances have suggested I set this artsy photojournalism shtick aside and write the one type of book they’re certain will sell-sell-sell: A mystery novel.

I thanked each of these well-meaning friends and relatives, but gave each of them one reason (the same reason to each) why I’ve never wanted to write a mystery novel.

I hate mystery novels.

Specifically, I hate the central conceit behind the formula whodunit story–the wanton slaughter of human life treated as a quaint li’l intellectual puzzle, all clean and light and dispassionate.

I happen to believe violent crime, at its burning-cold heart, is the ultimate act of dehumanization. The killer, rapist, or mugger objectifies his/her victim as a mere thing in the way of the criminal’s goals?and objectifies himself/herself as a mere beast (no, as something less than a beast, as a mere machine cut off from the continuum of life).

And the writers (and readers) of formula whodunits, by this view, are, at least as a momentary expression of escapism, vicariously sharing in this soulless attitude.

The murder-victim character typically is both dehumanized by the killer and by the author, created to be nothing but a plot activator. The killer character typically is treated with slightly more empathy than the victim, but is still ultimately little more than an elusive safari prey, to be tracked down and bagged by the clever detective hero.

I know you’ll tell me there are mysteries out there that aren’t this inhumane in their depiction of inhumanity. But the whodunit authors who take homicide seriously (cf. Raymond Chandler) end up depicting acts and attitudes of sad, futile nihilism. Emotionally accurate, perhaps, but awfully grim-n’-depressin’.

Longtime readers of this site know I believe David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks was, and is, my all-time fave TV drama and one of the most true-to-life portrayals of Northwest life ever filmed. Yes, it had a murder mystery as its central plotline. But part of what made me love it is that Lynch and Frost deliberately broke several of the rules of murder mysteries (thusly dooming the series to a short network run). The murder victims (at least most of them—we never really got to know the likes of Bernard Renault) were human beings with good and bad sides and personalities and everything, whose demises were treated with tragic weight. The killers, particularly the schizo Leland Palmer (a medium-time sleazeball even when in his “right” mind), were also humanized. They were still violent criminals, with or without the excuse of demonic possession, but they were also victims in their own way; victims of their own dark ambitions and vanities.

But Twin Peaks succeeded as a great story because it failed as a mystery-puzzle. If I were to attempt a story that could be commercially marketed as a “mystery,” it’d have to be one that had no successful homicides in it.

There are plenty of precedents for this type of bloodless investigation yarn (Nancy Drew, Cookie’s Fortune, various stories investigating such lesser crimes as jewel heists and art forgeries).

If any of you have any favorites in this area, or wish to tell me I’m totally wrong about the whole premise of this piece, lemme know.

It’s the final cue for David Brinkley, TV news legend/crank and longtime working partner of ex-Seattleite (and Frances Farmer ex-boyfriend) Chet Huntley.

MEANWHILE, one of Brinkley’s ex-colleagues Bill Moyers recently gave a speech in DC, in which he lambasted “the new corporate aristocracy, as privileged a class as we have seen since the plantation owners of antebellum America and the court of Louis IV,” and in which he also called upon all concerned citizens to fight back for the true American ideals:

“…that a Social Security card is not a private portfolio statement but a membership ticket in a society where we all contribute to a common treasury so that none need face the indignities of poverty in old age without that help. That tax evasion is not a form of conserving investment capital but a brazen abandonment of responsibility to the country. That income inequality is not a sign of freedom-of-opportunity at work, because if it persists and grows, then unless you believe that some people are naturally born to ride and some to wear saddles, it’s a sign that opportunity is less than equal. That self-interest is a great motivator for production and progress, but is amoral unless contained within the framework of community. That the rich have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more homes, vacations, gadgets and gizmos, but they do not have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else. That public services, when privatized, serve only those who can afford them and weaken the sense that we all rise and fall together as “one nation, indivisible.” That concentration in the production of goods may sometimes be useful and efficient, but monopoly over the dissemination of ideas is evil. That prosperity requires good wages and benefits for workers. And that our nation can no more survive as half democracy and half oligarchy than it could survive “half slave and half free” – and that keeping it from becoming all oligarchy is steady work – our work.”

A new alt-art boutique just opened on East Pine Street called the Bluebottle Art Gallery and Store. It’s a nice little place and you oughta see it, even though it’s only peripheral to today’s topic.

When I first went there a couple of months back, I asked the co-owner if the store was named after Peter Sellers’s beloved Bluebottle character on the old BBC Radio Goon Show. It was. I immediately appreciated the place even more, though I neglected to go into my impersonation of the character’s squeaky boy-falsetto (“Yew FEEL-thy SWINE! Yew have DEADED me again!”) on the store’s premises.

I instead went home and, over the several following weeks, downloaded and listened to all 150 or so still-existing Goon Show episodes.

Nearly half a century after they were made, these comedy classics still stand up. Not just because they were the famous Sellers’s first springboard to global stardom, and not just because their inspired nonsense heavily influenced everybody from the Monty Python boys to the Beatles (whose record producer George Martin and favorite filmmaker Richard Lester had been involved in Goon side projects).

The Goon Show is timeless. Even the topical references (such as those to consumer-goods shortages, “early closing days,” and other miseries of postwar Britain) have now seamlessly blended in with the rest of the show’s detailed (if irrational) fictional universe.

Absurdity and nonsense have long been staple ingredients of British and Irish humor (Lewis Carroll, Flann O’Brien, et al.). But the Goons (Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Sellers) put a modern spin on it. When it launched in 1951 it was a breakthrough of modern-day illogic against the stuffy Music Hall-era Brit comedy of the time.

Milligan wrote or co-wrote almost all the scripts (nearly 250 over 10 years). They were set in assorted times and places, but almost always revolved around the basic contradiction between WWII-era British heroic pomposity and the hellish realities of war, followed by the decade-long postwar recession.

Yet there’s an upbeat air to the show. The characters (even Milligan’s drag spinster Minnie Bannister) are energetic and boistrous. The “trad jazz” interludes and big-band musical scores are brash and brassy. I’ve written in the past that every successful satire contains, in its aesthetic, the spirit of the satirist’s preferred alternative world. In this case, The Goon Show’s sauciness posited a modernist, populist alternative to the tired, caste-ridden old Britain. Some critics have even traced the whole subsequent “Swinging London” explosion back to the Goons.

But Milligan’s perfectionism, and the sheer volume of the writing work involved, led him to a nervous breakdown midway through the show’s third season. He was hospitalized for over two months. After Milligan got back to the show full-time, he transformed its structure from a melange of self-contained skits into full half-hour adventure farces that built absurdities upon one another, complete with lengthy asides and subplots and sidetracks.

The underlying premise behind most episodes: Patriotic, ambitious everyman Neddy Seagoon (voiced in a melodrama tenor by Harry Secombe) wants to be a hero (or at least be perceived as one) by performing various courageous acts. But his own greed and vanity hinder him as much as the impossibility of his quests and the villainy and/or idiocy of the supporting players (almost all played by Sellers and Milligan).

The proceedings played out like an audio cartoon, buoyed by the familiarity-building catch phrases, the frequent asides for wordplay, the clever-silly sound effects, and the cheery upbeat attitude held by almost all the characters—even when threatened with what Bluebottle called (and usually received) “the dreaded deading.”

By 1960, the show was finally put to pasture. (There were three made-for-TV reunions, the last in 1972). Sellers’s astounding film career had already taken off. Secombe held a variety of TV jobs, before and behind the cameras, until his death in 2001. (Secombe’s son Andrew played the voice of Annakin Skywalker’s junkyard boss in The Phantom Menace.)

Milligan had several more manic-depressive episodes over the next four decades, but he also wrote more than 50 books (war memoirs, children’s nonsense verse, political satires, parodies of great novels, etc.), wrote and/or acted in dozens of radio and TV shows, and appeared in a handful of films.

When Milligan succumbed to liver failure in March 2002, an era passed with him. An era of sophistication and, despite everything, optimism in humor. An era when official corruption and the futility of war were such publicly-acknowledged “givens” that they fit right in on the same script with groaner puns and sniggering references to movie starlets.

At a time when radio comedy has degenerated to creepy insult gags and film comedy has degenerated to dorky gross-out routines, we could sure use more of the Goons’ progressive chaos.

(In addiiton to the file-trading networks, Goon Show recordings can be had at this site and on this streaming online radio station. Eighty-one episodes are also available, in pristinely restored versions, on import CDs.)

…during my enforced absence from Broadband Nation (not in chronological order):

Attended the informal outdoor wedding of print MISC contributor Michael Thomas and Sherry Wooten, with their precocious li’l one expressing approval of the whole proceeding.

Attended the Edmonds Waterfront Festival, a simple and unpretentious small-town fair with all the standard carny rides, craft booths, fast-food fads, beer gardens, and generic “blooze” bands.

Witnessed some of the commotion at the Convention Center on the day of Oprah WInfrey’s big $180-a-seat self-help seminar. The few other males on the scene included the crew of long-running cable access show Music Inner City, complete with “Oprah for President” stickers.

LET THIS BE THE FIRST CORNER to express sympathy and support for Mike Price, the former Washington State football coach who scored the prestigious U of Alabama head-coaching gig, then got fired before his first game after he spent one orgiastic weekend in Pensacola FL with strippers and/or hookers.

That’s just the sort of behavior adored by the guyz on The Best Damn Sports Show Period (and by student-athletes themselves), but so heavily loathed by the powers-that-be in Bama. You know, the state that still flies a variant on the Confederate battle flag, and in which dildos are still illegal.

Far from being vilified for his victimless transgressions, Price should be lauded as a freedom fighter against conservative hypocrisy.

Charles Douglass, inventor of the TV laugh track; and Bernie Little, who owned the Miss Budweiser hydroplane team and unofficially (in later years officially) controlled the motor-boat racing circuit.

…from CBC’s now-on-hiatus arts series Zed: A RealVideo clip presenting the hauntingly beautiful song stylings of Northwest Territories throat singer Tanya Tagaq Gillis, with a live electro-ambient backup band.

IN RESPONSE to many of your requests, we’re cutting down on the site’s ad volume (particularly those pop-ups nobody seems to buy anything from).

THURSDAY WAS A HUGE NEWS DAY LOCALLY. Here are just a few of the goings-down:

• SEATTLE’S BEST COFFEE got sold out from under itself by its Atlanta conglomerate owner. SBC and its Torrefazione Italia sub-chain will be absorbed into Starbucks’ operations, with only the brand names continuing to exist. Thus ends what had been one of Seattle’s hottest retail rivalries since the demise of the Frederick & Nelson department store. (SBC is technically a year older than Starbucks, tracing its roots to a 1970-vintage Seattle Center House ice-cream stand called the Wet Whisker.) The hipster crowd has already publicly eschewed both chains in favor of mom-‘n’-pop indie cafes. Last winter, the Stranger essentially chided local indie Cafe Ladro as being too chainlike to be truly cool, despite having a mere eight stores.
• APPLE COMPUTER said it would open one of its own retail stores in Bellevue Square, invading not only the home turf of Microsoft but also that of Computer Stores Northwest, one of the country’s top independent Apple-only retailers.
• THE SONICS’ SEASON ended quietly with a decisive, meaningless victory over the Phoenix Suns. The team’s ought-two/ought-three campaign really ended weeks ago with the Gary Payton trade; it’s been in rebuilding and reloading mode ever since.
• ACT THEATER said it had raised enough emergency donations to would survive for the time being, albeit with major cutbacks. Let’s hope it gets back to the funky, audience-friendly aesthetic of its heritage, after a half-decade of dot-com-era largesse and pretentions.
• KCTS KICKED its longtime president Burnill Clark into early retirement and fired 35 employees. Yeah, it’s a recessionary cutback, but it also marks the end, at least for now, of the Seattle PBS affiliate’s years-long drive to become a major player in supplying national network programming. The ambitious venture generated some great shows (particularly Greg Palmer’s Vaudeville and Death: The Trip of a Lifetime). The loss of KCTS’s network-production unit is another setback for the local film/video production community, already struggling under the dual blows of the overall economic ickiness and cheap Canadian filming.
• THE EXPERIENCE MUSIC PROJECT announced it would replace its “Artist’s Journey” attraction, the least museum-like and most theme-park-esque of its offerings, with a separate museum of science fiction memorabilia. It only makes sense for an institution founded upon computer-nerd largesse to partially rededicate itself to the nerds’ most favoritist art form of them all. You might beg the question: Will it be tacky? I damn hope so.

…you’re promoting as a simple, reliable machine? How about with a two-minute, one-continuous-take TV commercial that reuses the car’s parts as a Rube Goldberg invention?