…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?

ALAS, our official Best Show On TV, CBC’s Zed, shuts down for the season Tuesday night (11:25 pm) after only 110 weeknight editions. (Still more than Carson showed up for in his last full year.) Starting Wednesday, its time slot will be occupied by hockey payoffs. Now we must wait until fall (or until any yet-unannounced summer reruns) for our fix of weird short films, avant-arts documentary segments, ambient-trance music, and ever-so-elegant host Sharon Lewis (if you’re reading this, Ms. Lewis, please consider becoming my green-card bride so I can live in a sane country).

Or you can go to Zed‘s giant website, where hundreds of films and musical performances from the show are archived. One of my personal favorites on the site is Violet, a complex, existential, and vigorous nine-minute dance short performed by the stunningly accomplished (and elegantly nude) Vancouver dancer Ziyian Kwan. Unfortunately, the site only has an info page (not the film itself) for Babyfilm, a darkly hilarious fake educational film encouraging new parents to become totally paranoid about anything that could possibly be unsafe for the baby. Neither would likely ever appear on PBS, let alone in a high-profile time slot.

CBC just ran a commercial for Zero brand liquid detergent, promising a goth-gal it would keep her clothes their blackest.

TODAY, SOME IMAGES from the past five days of local protests. As in the 1991 war, these were centered at the Federal Building. And as in the 1991 war, they tactically differed from the prewar protests.

The prewar protests included broad coalitions of groups, including labor unions and churches. They were devised to bring as many people as possible to one place at one time.

Last week’s protests were largely coordinated by the Radical Women/Freedom Socialist Party. They were devised as long vigils with a couple of extra highlighted gathering times (particularly Thursday evening). This diffused the number of potential participants, and emphasized the role of those for whom protesting is a year-round way of life.

That meant the speakers’ podium was dominated by dudes (almost all of whom were bearded) and dudettes who wanted to tie in the Iraq war with darned near everything else they didn’t like, from McDonald’s and health-care budget cuts to the capitalist system in general.

Even if we’re not doing this primarily for how it will look in the media, it’d still be to our advantage if it didn’t look like only the lifestyle-leftists still wanted peace. We need the experienced dedicated protestors; but we need to keep the rest of the populace in this as well. And that means bigger coalitions creating bigger events, which also recruit people from all walks-O-life into ongoing works in the more boring parts of the task (organizing, letter-writing, etc.)

IN OTHER NEWS, J.C. Penney had a commercial during the Oscars with average suburban young-women’s clothes modeled on screen while an off-screen singer proclaimed “I’m a One-Girl Revolution.” What if we had a 200-million-girl-and-boy revolution that was about something other than wearing different clothes?

What would an actual revolution be like today? What would be replaced, and what would it be replaced with? Any ideas? Lemme know.

…a little further on the addictive quest for what my previous post referred to as “abstract power,” the destructive madness that’s fueling our governmental elite during its current drive toward doom.

Some of you who lived through the Watergate era remember the “Blind Ambition,” as Nixon aide John Dean described the White House mindset of the time.

Look at the number of un-reconstructed Nixonians back in the White House now, imagine three decades’ worth of stewing grudges and revenge fantasies.

Next, consider the “Reality Distortion Field.”

That’s the late-’80s-coined phrase with which Apple Computer cofounder Steve Jobs was accused of being selectively unaware of business conditions that didn’t fit what he chose to believe. The lieutenants and yes-men who surrounded Jobs, according to this theory, held such personal loyalty to their boss that they came to share his delusions?and to feed them back to him, by giving him highly edited market data and highly weighted interpretations of that data.

Finally, we have the example of Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal.

This documentary, currently airing on the Game Show Network, tells the tragic life story of Michael Larson, an unemployed ice-cream truck driver from Ohio with three kids by three different mothers, a man obsessed with finding the perfect get-rich-quick scheme that would set him up for life. He spent his jobless days watching the four or five TV sets he’d stacked in his tiny apartment. He watched the now-classic Press Your Luck until he realized the show’s big game board wasn’t really random, that he could predict the order of its blinking lights and stop it on any prize square he wanted. He got to LA, somehow got through the contestant-casting process, and legally took the network for over $100,000. He then promptly lost it all between a shady real-estate deal and a burglary at his home (yes, he’d kept thousands in small bills lying around the apartment!).

Anyhoo, during the documentary a staff member on the old show recalls seeing a steely, emotionless stare in Larson’s eyes. The staffer says he saw the same look years later, when his teenage son started getting hooked on video games. It’s the “in the zone” stare one gets when one has become one with the game. Total zen-like concentration on making the right moves in the right sequence, and on the power-rush rewards for success. Total obliviousness to everything that is neither the screen nor the control console.

This country, my loyal readers, is being run by people who try to run government, and war, as one big video game. The chickenhawks don’t want to fight. They never wanted to fight. They just want to manipulate the joysticks of power by all means available, including by the means of making other people fight for them, whilst they remain in their posh office suites and luxurious homes bossing everybody around.

I could give a fourth metaphor here, but you already know about the hubris and comeuppance of those ol’ dot-com bosses.

…Mister Rogers tribute I could find online, at the Emmy Awards site. But even it excludes some important facts about Rogers’s lifetime accomplishment:

• Rogers’s show, along with its mirror-opposite Sesame Street, are the two PBS shows still around from the days of the network’s even-more-underfunded precursor, National Educational Television. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (originally MisteRogers’ Neighborhood) was far closer than the slicked-up Street to NET’s old homespun/threadbare aesthetic. Neighborhood‘s opening/closing miniature street scene once started and ended on a model of NET’s house-and-antenna logo.
• Different Rogers obits give different dates for Neighborhood‘s debut. That’s because it launched quietly in ’65 on an even smaller station hookup, the Eastern Educational Network. It went national on NET in ’68, just one year before the bigger and noisier Sesame Street launched.
• Sesame Street was a thorough product of the bureaucracy that would become PBS. It was written by committees, from “lesson plans” devised in other committees. It employed the cream of the New York ad-production community, including Jim Henson. It utilized all the latest tricks of video, film, and animation; particularly that newfangled toy called electronic videotape editing that had made Laugh-In and Hee Haw feasible.Rogers’s show, in contrast, was shot on a small stage in Pittsburgh. It was paced by Rogers’s gentle speech mannerisms and jazz pianist John Costa’s tinkly syncopations. On many if not most episodes, they stopped the tape only during the transitions between the human and puppet scenes.
• Rogers’s easygoing yet careful attitude extended to the show’s production. He ground out 130 episodes (writing all the scripts and songs) for the show’s first NET season. Another 330 were produced over the next seven years. (These early episodes haven’t been rerun in a long time.) Then in 1975 he stopped, to pursue other kid-advocacy ventures. Four years later he donned the sweater again, producing only an average of 20 shows a year for the next 22 years. (And you thought Johnny Carson’s last years were rerun-heavy.)He didn’t need to be locked in the studio week in and week out. His deliberately-squaresville schtick was timeless (the only big change was that the shows’ life-lesson aspects became preachier in the latter seasons). There are always kids, and they more or less always face the same questions and problems.
• Except on the soaps, nobody played the same “role” on TV longer than Rogers. His very survival, as a voice of sanity in a kiddie-media landscape which (even when he began) had always been predicated on frenetic action, is a sign that you don’t have to be the biggest or loudest or cutest kid to make it in the world.

…at the (beautiful) main Tacoma Public Library was a smash. Some 60 Citizens of Destiny listened to me, KIRO-AM’s Dave Ross, and two Tacoma News Tribune writers debate whether or not we’re all amusing ourselves into oblivion. I, as I told you here I would, said we’re not.

If anything, I said, the current would-be social controllers aren’t trying to get us to ignore serious issues by force-feeding us light entertainment. They’re trying to get us obsessed with certain serious issues at a non-rational level of fear and obedience.

As I’d expected, there were several cranky old hippies who pined for the pre-TV golden age they were absolutely convinced had existed just before they were born, and who didn’t believe me when I told them the old newsreels had war theme songs long before CNN. I also tried to reassure some of the library loyalists in the crowd that books weren’t going away anytime soon (even if library budgets are currently big on DVDs and, in Seattle’s case, on building projects rather than on book buying); whether the stuff inside tomorrow’s books will be worth reading is a different question.

One woman in the audience noted that Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (the topic of an everybody-in-town-reads-one-book promotion to which this panel was a tie-in event) ended with a scene of people reciting from their favorite banned books, which they’d cared to memorize. In a variation on the old “desert island disc” question, she asked the panel what books we’d prefer to memorize. I mumbled something about The Gambler and Fanny Hill, saying they represented skills and pursuits that some people in a post-apocalyptic situation might not consider vital to survival but I would. I’m sure tomorrow I’ll think of a few tomes far more appropriate to the hypothetical situation. If you’ve any desert-island books, feel free to email the titles and reasons why you’d choose them.

…but here’s one that’s not boring, with Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Wheadon.

Last weekend, the newspaper pundits were full of ponderings concerning the state of “independent” film, following the end of the past Sundance Festival in Utah.

Reality check time.

Sundance, now either part- or majority-owned by Viacom, is not really about independent filmmaking and hasn’t been since at least 1997. At best, one can say it’s about “art house” film marketing, the sort of thing at which Roger Corman, Sam Goldwyn Jr., and their cronies used to excel. At worst, it’s just another excuse for celebrity gossip bullshit and studio dealmaking corruption—precisely what truly independent film is a rebellion against.

K Records cofounder Calvin Johnson has defined an independent record label as a record label that’s neither owned, financed, nor distributed by one of the five majors. A similarly simple demarcation could be made for independent movies, except for the huge gray area between a film’s production and its distribution.

The days of such indie-film companies as Goldwyn, Cinecom, Cannon, DeLaurentiis, Hemdale, and Atlantic Releasing have gone the way of RKO and Monogram. Nowadays, only three truly independent theatrical distributors in North America are big enough for Variety to notice—IFC Films (owned by big cable-TV-system operator Cablevision), Lions Gate, and Alliance Atlantis. All the bigger “indie” distributors are merely niche-market (and non-union) subsidiaries of the intellectual-property conglomerates: Fox Searchlight, Sony Classics, Miramax (Disney), New Line (AOL Time Warner), and Focus Features (Vivendi Universal).

These niche divisions don’t sit around buying up movies completed by rugged individualist filmmakers (despite the Sundance Festival’s mythology). More and more, they’re financing, packaging, and asserting total creative control over the products they release. (Miramax bankrolled the last Broadway revival of the musical Chicago to spur interest in its now-current film version.) They package mid-budget films as career-enhancing vehicles for stars under contract to the parent company. They crank out movies in fad genres for as long as the fads last (Pulp Fiction-esque hip violence, black-middle-class relationship comedies).

Some of the films but out by the big studios’ farm-team units are at least sort-of cool.

But they’re not independent films.

So what exactly is an independent film?

Here are a few guidelines:

• If it was made in Britain in the past ten years and doesn’t have James Bond in it, it’s probably independent.
• If it was filmed in Canada and actually set in Canada, it’s probably independent.
• If Tom Hanks was involved in any aspect of its production, it’s absolutely, positively not independent.
• If no cast or crew members have ever been on Jay Leno, it stands a good chance of being independent.
• If it stars a current or past boyfriend of Jennifer Lopez, it’s probably not independent (if it was made after or shortly before said Lopez hookup).
• If it’s all about the wacky travails besetting an independent filmmaker, it’s almost certainly an independent film (albeit a trite one).
• If it was directed by a woman who isn’t also an actress, it’s likely to be independent.
• If it was directed by an African American whose surname is neither Lee nor Wayans, it’s almost assuredly independent.
• If it’s about racial struggles but doesn’t have a noble white hero, it’s apt to be independent.
• If it includes a female character who both takes her clothes off and has actual speaking lines, it’s more likely these days to be independent.
• If it includes a male character who takes his clothes off (without being hidden by a dresser drawer or a potted plant), it’s undoubtedly independent.

IT’S BEEN OVER A WEEK since our last post to this site. (Sorry.) Things that have gone on during that time:

• The Chubby & Tubby hardware-variety stores were put up for sale, and simultaneously began a liquidation sale. Wanna help me buy and preserve ’em?
• The Sonics continued to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, in game after game.
• A&E reran its Cleavage documentary, an excuse to show seconds-long clips displaying 50 years’ worth of minimal attire. In true American-repressed fashion, the show censored all nipple and see-thru shots—except during icky surgery scenes.
• The two-years-in-the-making eighth issue of the literary tabloid Klang came out, with a long story by yr. obd’t web-editor about the Alasdair Gray novel Poor Things.
• I’ve continued to work tirelessly on assembling the next print MISC, which should wow and wonder you any week now.
• I viewed Scarecrow Video’s copy of the unjustly obscure Mexican film Sexo por Compasion (Compassionate Sex) Made in 1999 by director Laura Mana, it deftly applies the neopagan “sacred prostitute” legend and sets it in a lethargic little Catholic town.Our heroine Dolores (Lisabeth Margoni) is a plump, middle-aged barmaid who’s so conscientiously pious, her husband splits town rather than face her “excess of goodness.” This only prompts her to redouble her efforts at do-gooder-hood, until she overhears a male barfly complaining about his own straying wife. She offers her sympathy in the best way she can imagine. While there’s no on-screen sex in the film, we’re told the man learns from Dolores that a little sin isn’t so bad; and that he also learns how to satisfy his own wife.

  With the speed of small-town gossip, the town’s men all line up for Dolores (who’s renamed herself Lolita!). She soothes and consoles all (middle-aged virgins, widowers, the lonely, the misunderstood). She asks nothing in return but donations for the church building fund.

  Director Mana switches from b/w to color. The men are now energetic and serene. Their wives don’t like that they’ve been barred from Lolita’s bar, but adore their hubbies’ new sexual knowledge and doting tenderness.

  Everybody’s happy and well-adjusted—except the now underworked hookers from the next town and the priest who goes mad when he learns the source of the parish’s new riches. But Lolita gets their heads set straight soon enough.

  Even Lolita’s returning hubby eventually learns to stop condemning her love-sharing ways, after the town wives draft him into giving them some compassionate sex. The film ends with the happy announcement that Lolita’s going to have “our child,” the “our” referring to the whole town.

  That’s all cozy and uplifting. It’s also neatly confined somewhere in the outer provinces of Latino “magical realism.” Could anything like its premise work out in real life, in jaded urban civilization? I’ve no answers. Even the authors of New Age essays about the “sacred prostitute” archtype seldom come out and advocate reviving the practice. (They mostly ask female readers to take the legend as a lesson for individual self-esteem.)

  I do know the film’s penultimate plot twist is comparable to my own mini-essay in this space a month or so back calling for a men’s antiwar movement, which I only half-facetiously christened “Peepees for Peace.” It would refute “alternative” culture’s frequent denunciations of masculinity, instead proclaiming a positive role for yang passion in the building of a better world.

  None of the “sacred prostitute” books I’ve seen mention men providing sexual/spiritual enlightenment to women—only women healing men and women healing themselves.

  What if there were more women like this film’s Lolita—and more men like her husband at the film’s end, healing the planet one clitoris at a time?

…Punk: Pistols to Present, a 25-year retrospective that actually includes some of the pioneer acts often forgotten in such retrospectives (Damned, Runaways, Buzzcocks). The VJ’s background set and the show’s “bumper” logos (what you see before and after the commercial breaks), however, look creepily like the work of a corporate ad agency trying to ape a punk look (PoMo-ironic drawings of safety pins, “graffiti” typefaces). The “…to Present” side of the show’s equation is heavy on the MTV-friendly side of ’90s alternarock. Green Day is playing as I write this; I fully expect to see the Offspring and Stone Temple Pilots by the show’s end. I also expect to not see Fugazi. SO: Decide for yourself. Tribute? Exploitation? All of the above?

(Update: Further on in the show, there’s a No Doubt video and a documentary segment about a display of oldtime punk DIY posters—at a Levi’s-sponsored summer package tour!)

(Further Update: The show concludes with the predictable pairing of “God Save the Queen” and the newly-released Nirvana outtake song.)

…indeed the best show on TV thus far in this decade.

The CBC’s Zed (named, of course, after the Great White North’s pronounciation of the alphabet’s last letter) is a magazine show of experimental video, animation, and performance art. That capsule description could apply to a dozen or more past shows on PBS and other Stateside channels. But the Vancouver-produced Zed is far different, and far better, than those. Some reasons:

• It’s on its country’s premier network, in a premier time slot: 11:25 p.m.-12:25 a.m. every weeknight, commercial-free. It’s cutting-edge, but it’s not “fringe.”
• It’s carefully curated and sequenced, despite the enormous amount of material it requires. Canada has vast short-film and animation scenes (due partly to arts grants and to the world-renowned National Film Board of Canada), and Zed could consume all its output in a grab-baggy way. Instead, each episode carfully curates a mix of dramatic-narrative shorts, outre comedies, odd cartoons, mini-documentaries, modern-dance clips, spoken-word snippets, avant-garde musical performances, and items too odd to classify.
• Elegant, erudite emcee Sharon Lewis deftly weaves common threads around each night’s selections, without resorting either to support-the-arts hype nor to PBS-style smugness. She knows these are engrossing, captivating films, and she knows she doesn’t have to hard-sell them to you.
• Under the slogan “Open Source Television,” the show solicits viewer contributions. One of my favorites in this category was a tape of a 10-year-old boy trying hard to stay awake to watch the show.
• The show welcomes viewers of all ages, but doesn’t pander or clean things up for them. In keeping with the Film Board’s heritage, the films on Zed can include quite heavy subject matter (abortion, poverty, bereavement, loneliness). The cartoons can range from the gross-out to the incomprehensibly symbolic. Nudity and cuss words are left intact. One clip featured the writhing of a nude male modern dancer; its soundtrack consisted of the dancer discussing the kind of man with whom he’d most want to fall in love.
• The show’s segments have MTV-like credit screens at the beginning and end. These titles include “Web ID” numbers for each short. Anything you see and like (or want to decipher), you can see again online. And if you live where CBC isn’t on cable (i.e., the United States south of Tacoma), you can see and hear the show’s component parts online, though one piece at a time and without Lewis’s introductions.
• But the most important aspects of Zed are its confident attitude and Lewis’s honest rapport with her viewers. The show presumes a universe in which the sorts of ideas and expressions it presents are fully-accepted and respected features of a sophisticated urban society. Zed is neither elitist nor pandering. It fully respects its viewers’ intelligence. It doesn’t divide the populace into “cultured” and “uncultured” castes. It fully expects you to “get” whatever it shows; and if you don’t, or if you don’t like it, something else will be along in less than six minutes.

Zed’s site doesn’t mention how many episodes are in its current first season. CBC series often have short production seasons. But Zed mostly consists of pre-existing (i.e., relatively cheap to acquire) material, so theoretically go on year-round (albeit with rerun weeks here and there).

My advice: If you’re capable of tuning in to it, watch as many Zed episodes as you can now. See what highbrow-arts TV can really become.

WEDNESDAY’S EDITION of the new Pyramid was a Seattle special. It was still taped in LA, but had KOMO-TV’s Kathi Goertzen and Steve Pool as the “celebrities,” and locals found at a recent audition as the civilian contestants. One category was “Things Associated With Grunge.” They were: “T-Shirt,” “Jeans,” “Flannel,” and “Tattoo.” Nothing about music was among the items on the list, at least not among those Pool and his partner could get to within the alloted time.