It's here! It's here! All the local news headlines you need to know about, delivered straight to your e-mail box and from there to your little grey brain.
Learn more about it here.
Sign up at the handy link below.
CLICK HERE to get on board with your very own MISCmedia MAIL subscription!
…to two of the greatest names in 20th century comedy–the original Bedazzled schmuck and the first funnyman of U.S. television.
…to 51-year TV veteran Mary Stuart, who has finally found the “Tomorrow” for which she had searched.
OUR ‘SIGNIFYING NOTHING’ PHOTO SHOW at the spendid Zeitgeist Kunst & Kaffee (2nd & Jackson in Seattle’s nicer-than-you-think Pioneer Square) ends this Wednesday. See it immediately.
However, this will not be your last chance to see our haunting color photos of abandoned signage. Another whole batch of these images will appear in the Spring issue of Arcade, the Northwest architecture-and-design journal. A release party for the issue will be held from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. this Thursday, March 7, at the picturesque Panama Hotel Tea House, 605 1/2 South Main Street in Seattle’s Chinatown/International District. Be there or be longitudinal.
WHY bad habits can actually be good for us.
A LOVING TRIBUTE, complete with audio clips galore, in honor of ’70s TV shows and commercials.
…the Seattle theatre-scene past of psychic-phone shill Miss Cleo (updated link).
…Terry Jones ponders what would happen if current ideologies i/r/t bombing any country where a terrorist lives were applied a little closer to home.
THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA are finally discovering something I knew all along: “It’s cool to be Canadian!”
It’s only natural this discovery should happen during an Olympic Games, in which media critics (and thousands of other viewers) in norther-tier U.S. regions routinely discover the more thoughtful, less hype-centric CBC coverage.
CBC’s even more vital during a Winter Olympics, what with the Dominion’s traditional strength in hockey, snowboarding, and especially curling (the official World’s Greatest Game). This vitality was only serendipitously enhanced by the emergence of two Canadians as heroes of the current games’ biggest story.
It must be noted, however, that NBC’s coverage this time around is thankfully more CBC-like. That is, it’s more devoted (especially in its daytime blocks on MSNBC and CNBC) to actual sports coverage aimed at people who are, or could conceivably become, interested in the actual sports. Someone there finally noticed that with the network no longer airing baseball, pro football, or (after this season) pro basketball, it’d better start to do right by the one big sports package it still controls.
Over the past three biennia, NBC’s Olympics telethons drew fewer and fewer viewers, especially young-adult TV viewers, even though they’re a celebration of young-adult achievement. By dumbing-down the events and their storylines into ready-for-prime-time pablum, tape-delaying events and then showing only brief snippets of them in between interminable personality-profile segments (usually about workaholic athletes who don’t really have personalities), and by reinterpreting every event as The US vs. Those People, NBC made its telecasts a big joke to anyone who seriously participated in these sports and a squaresville turnoff to other young-adult viewers.
So this time, we get long(er) stretches of live (or, on KING, two-hour-old) events, with canned cutaway segments respectfully educating viewers on the events and their particular inherent dramatic qualities. The personality pieces are fewer, and include at least a modicum of non-US participants. (Of course, it helped the network that it had a real news story at the games to which it could give the OJ/Monica/Jon Benet tabloid treatment.)
I still prefer the CBC approach, though. For one thing, they’ve got much more curling. Also, they spent much less time reiterating every twist-N-turn in the skating-judging affair, even though it starred two Canadians. And its late-night shows are refreshing apres-ski entertainments built around the games’ outdoor concerts (several of which have starred Canadian performers). NBC has the same ol’ grating Leno, who just gets more Attitude-dependent and unlistenable as he approaches his tenth anniversary.
THANX TO THE NEARLY 100 souls who braved the blustery Feb. night to attend our suave Signifying Nothing exhibition opening last night. The rest of you can see it seven days a week until March 6 at the 2nd & S. Jackson.
BACK ON THE POP-CULT FRONT, that PBS workhorse Sesame Street got a major format overhaul this week. The kiddie-ed show now features far fewer one-minute-or-less blackout skits and films, instead favoring longer segments (up to 10 minutes) with narratives and familiar characters. Producers say this restructuring is the result of intense audience research into what Those Kids Today prefer to see.
This, of course, begs the question: What will come in future years, as this long-attention-span generation enters adolescence? I’m no corporate futurologist a la Faith Popcorn, but there are certainly intriguing possibilities to imagine emergine sometime in the mid-2010s:
FOLLOW THE WAR-MOBILIZATION of America’s single most vital industry.
ONE MORE REASON I love the CBC: Tonight they ran a documentary about the first year of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, right after a one-hour profile of Olympic women’s hockey players.
…surprise-surprise, turned out to be A Real Game for once, instead of a rout or a dogged defensive stalemate. It went all the way to the last second with a long-distanct FG by the team all the experts said would never make it.
There’s just one discomforting aspect: The winners just had to be the team in red-white-n’-blue, even named the Patriots. It was an almost scriptable result right after a three-hour pregame show, a halftime musical bombast, and umpteen paid and unpaid ads, all full to the proverbial brim with flag-waving sloganeering and solemnities. The whole interminable ad campaign for “America” as a product even made the Britney Spears Pepsi spots look comparatively tolerable.
On Thursday, I did my patriotic duty by helping support a valued yet endangered American institution.
Yes, I shopped at a Kmart.
Specifically, I obtained the Apex AD-3201, described by several websites as the best cheap DVD player currently available. It plays DVD movies, audio CDs, even MP3 audio files from CD/Rs. And with the right adjustments, it can even allegedly do things some much costlier players can’t.
The AD-3201 wasn’t out in the traditional back-wall TV/video display area (which had ample empty shelf slots). I had to hunt around to find a boxed unit, which I successfully did. I tried to reassure the clerk that the chain’s current crisis could indeed be nonfatal, as had the bankruptcy reorganization of the Bon Marche’s parent chain. She seemed insufficiently encouraged.
A leisurely stroll through the massive space revealed why she might have felt a bit down. About half the departments had at least some empty or near-empty shelves. Strolling customers were quite sparse (even for a recessionary January weeknight). Other display sections looked like they hadn’t been straightened up all day. Many floor tiles looked scuffy. Much of the apparel merchandise still looked thin and shoddy.
Stock clerks chatted aloud to one another, comparing the number of work hours they’d just had reduced. At the front, the head checkout clerk was dressing down her subordinates, demanding to know which one had been keeping an opened bag of potato chips at her checkstand.
The cheery signs and banners seemed an exercise in desperate, manic positivity. The whole place gave me flashbacks to the last six months of Frederick & Nelson.
Granted, the 130th & Aurora unit is one of Kmart’s oldest buildings, acquired in the early ’70s from the even cheaper old White Front chain. The other Seattle Kmart, in West Seattle’s lost valley of Delridge, is a lot nicer looking on the inside. But if the chain’s gonna mount any kind of serious comeback, it’ll have to get serious about making them inviting, fun places again.
…has come and gone, and I would not at all be surprised if you didn’t notice it unless you either had the day off from work/school or if you’d waited for mail delivery on Monday.
Mainstream-media coverage of the day was reduced to the bare minimum (Sunday op-ed pieces about The State of Race in America; quick TV clips of politicians’ speechifying about the great man intercut with children’s choirs doing old black spirituals).
Even the traditional MLK corporate “public service” ads, re-imaging Dr. King into corporate America’s preferred idea of a visionary (someone who shifts paradigms and thinks outside the proverbial box), were noticably diminished this year. Part of that could do with companies cutting back on expenses deemed unnecessary for fiscal survival.
But there might be another potential reason. The politicians, the companies, and particularly the media just might (might, I say) be particularly uncomfy this time around with Dr. King’s real messages. The man wasn’t just a dreamer. He was a dissident. He demanded to challenge the U.S. status quo, to insist this country live up to its professed ideals of liberty and equality. To King, being a proper American didn’t involve sanctimonious complacency. It meant working, fighting, to make this a better place, a more just place.
It’s almost certain that if King were around today, Lynne Cheney’s think tank would brand him as a bin Laden sympathizer.
THERE ARE ODD TV COMMERCIALS, then there are the truly, utterly strange, quasi-surreal spots that make you wonder what the ad agency people were drinking; or, in this next case, eating.
The spot I describe aired on various network daytime shows in early January. It opens with a business-suited yes man addressing “Governor Kempthorne.” The scene opens up to reveal a replica of the Idaho governor’s office, with the real governor seated at the desk. The aide continues, “Good news. There’s only one person more popular than you–Spuddy Buddy.”
A poorly drawn cartoon potato suddenly pops up on screen. He dances and sings the praises of baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, fries, and assorted other ways you can devour his tuber brethern. The half-minute closes with the governor telling the potato toon, “I hope you’re not running for office anytime soon.”
The Spuddy Buddy character was created by the state’s potato commission two or three years back, at least partly as an icon for children’s merchandising. A major PR agency spent untold bucks and person-hours researching ways to get consumers to demand Idaho spuds instead of whatever’s cheapest, and apparently decided a lovable spokescritter would be a great teach-’em-while-they’re-young concept.
The cartoon spud, however awkward looking, does have enough fans to generate at least one fan-fiction story of a sort, to be mentioned as a prop in other net-fiction, and the subject of speculators’ attempts to create a new Beanie Baby-style collecting fad.
But the figure has a different meaning for me. He reminds me of my lonely-college-boy days in the UW School of Communications. The advertising majors loved to scoff at us editorial-journalism majors, boasting that they were sure to get high-paying careers and we weren’t.
Then, one day in a Communications Building classroom, I saw the image that made me decide once and for all to follow my dream and avoid the suckup world of bigtime corporate advertising. As you might be guessing, it was a storyboard for a mock TV commercial featuring a singing, dancing cartoon potato.
I’m thinking I ought to send out for the Spuddy Buddy plush doll, as a reminder of the ol’ road-not-taken thang.
…or what would at least make for interesting new stories:
The touring Weakest Link contestant search hit Seattle today. Showed up at the new downtown Hyatt at 11 am. Got a numbered tag and was told to return at 12. At that time I was herded, along with 134 other hopefuls, into a big luxurious meeting room.
A sometimes annoying standup-comic type who claimed his name was Seven presided over the cattle-call round. We all filled out the five-page applications while Seven asked each of us to publicly describe ouselves in the manner of the show’s opening (first name, age, occupation, hometown). There were lotsa would-be amateur comedians during this segment (one young secretarial type announced her occupation as “aspiring prostitute,” for instance). This segment ended with a 20-question trivia test. Seven read the questions aloud; we answered on the last page of our applications. I knew all but two.
After a 20-minute break, I was one of the 27 from the large group invited to a smaller upstairs meeting room. We had our Polaroids taken, had short interviews with a second (and more obnoxious) casting coordinator, and were put into four groups to, one group at a time, play a quick round of the game in front of a little video camcorder. Of my three questions, I only got one right, but tried to at least be entertainingly wrong on the other two.
We were told that this round was mainly to test our personalities and “chemistry” with other players, and that the final decision on whom (if anyone) would get plane tix to Beautiful Downtown Burbank would depend on what types they’re looking to mix-n’-match for any particular episode’s roster. Even then, 14 people would be flown in, with the producers choosing the 8 on-air players at the studio. The rest would be eligible for future call-backs.
Both facilitators mentioned this audition was for the network WL with the fetishistically-prim Anne Robinson, not the impending syndicated version. We were even told to talk back to the second MC as if he were Anne.
It was a pleasant enough way to kill three hours. I didn’t clam up on the camcorder, and remembered to smile and sass back when the male pseudo-Anne sassed me. I’m not obsessed with getting on the show, but it would be nice to get the trip and two free nights at the Sheraton-Universal.
UPDATE #1: My ol’ pal Susan Rathke’s second and final Jeopardy! episode appeared tonight. Though she was felled by a particularly tuff “Final Jeopardy” question, she still left with $23,000 and a cool overseas vacation trip (not to mention an NY Times subscription and a copy of the home game). Way to go!
UPDATE #2: A Calif. entrepreneur is trying to relaunch Luxuria Music, the Internet radio station that played an amazing blend of lounge, exotica, swing, and related music prior to its April demise at the hands of radio mega-chain Clear Channel Commuications. You can read more about the scheme at his site, Luxuriamusic.net.
PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1999: The Seattle WTO protests of two years ago were already a nostalgia topic six months later. They were remembered in a series of events today. The one I went to (at Westlake Center) and the one attended by one of our MISC informants (at Seattle Central C.C.) were dull, pallid affairs. Each had no more than a couple hundred anarcho-hippies and aging punk rockers singing songs, chanting chants, and otherwise giving rote by-the-numbers “radical” stances.
Before today, we’d wondered aloud how the anti-globalization movement would respond after the terror attacks of Sept. (which were centered at a symbol of globalization that even had “World Trade” in its very name). The answer, at least as far as today’s events went: Quite lacklusterly. The two outdoor commemorations attracted few beyond the hardcore far-left kids (and even among them, the Mumia and Revolutionary Communist cliques didn’t have much of a presence).
A good case against global corporate power-grabbing can still be made. It is possible to despise what the skyjackers did and still seek a more fair, more just world, a world in which the needs of the people and the earth would be given more importance than the Almighty Stock Price. But such a stance would now require more subtlety, more tact, and more intelligence than the more one-dimensional parts of the anti-WTO shtick could’ve accommodated.
My pal’s Jeopardy! appearance doesn’t air locally until Thursday. I forgot about Monday Night Football screwing up the show’s schedule here during the fall.
ELSEWHERE:
“Why Copyright Laws Hurt Culture.”
If you don’t click on this link, then the terrorists will have won.
