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?

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.