THE FOLLOWING comes from Aaron Barnhardt’s TV Barn site:

“Televised terrorist attack. We are looking at a giant factory of death. Smoke billows from from two glassy chimneys — then the chimneys tremble and sink from view. On the ground level, it is as though a volcano erupted. Watching Fox, I see zombies pass by. MSNBC’s, CBS’s and ABC’s Internet servers are overloaded…

“Twelve blocks north, an NBC News reporter (Jim Donahue?) did a standup while hundreds of firefighters, clad in black, walked past him to the scene of suffering. Around the reporter the sky was clear. One mile from the factory of death it was a beautiful late summer day.”

The best “new” TV series of 2001 (thus far) is a leftover from 1999 that just happens to completely outdo that overblown A.I. movie in regards to questioning the nature of humanity-vs.-machines.

It’s a cartoon on the Fox Kids schedule, The Big Guy and Rusty.

The show’s origin lies with a graphic novel made in the mid-’90s for Portland comics giant Dark Horse, by Frank Miller and Geof Darrow. Miller (who’s often credited with the “darker” characterization of Batman that inspired that figure’s movies) and Darrow had collaborated since the late ’80s on sullen, violent, and stunningly-drawn titles such as Hard Boiled.

The Big Guy was a slight departure from the established Miller-Darrow formula. It was set in a bright, futuristic urban environment modeled on latter-day Japanese anime films. Its heroes (inspired by those of the early Japanese cartoons Gigantor and Astroboy) were real heroes, not gruff antiheroes (albeit more heavily armed, and more prone to retaliatory vengeance, than their wholesome precursors).

The Sony-owned Columbia Tristar Television bought the animation rights in 1995. During its four-year development period, executive producer Richard Raynis kept Darrow’s character and background designs but tossed most of Miller’s plot. Raynis and his team concocted a new premise for the characters, one that could support a strong central cast while allowing subplots and conflicts to unfold among multiple episodes.

So as the TV version starts, the Big Guy has already been defending Earth from alien invaders for 10 years. He’s an imposingly huge grey robot with an immobile “face,” a booming voice (spouting patriotic cliches), and giant arms filled with, well, giant arms (missiles, bombs, guns). He’s the oldline military-industrial America strutting its might and heft.

But only the Big Guy’s support team knows he’s not a “real” robot but just a big metallic suit, piloted by one Lt. Dwayne Hunter. Dwayne’s a soft-spoken, unassuming pilot who, when he’s out of the suit and walking on his own legs, shares none of his alter ego’s bombast.

Rusty, the show’s real protagonist, is a real robot, something the Big Guy’s original designers (a defense-contractor conglomerate whose tower is the tallest building in New Tronic City) have only now been able to accomplish. Rusty has the personality of an enthusiastic boy adventurer, avid to clobber the bad guys but lacking in experience or wisdom. Rusty represents the “new economy” and the high-tech future that seemed so promising in 1999, when the show was produced–high-flying, free-wheeling, but sometimes almost fatally immature.

Rusty adores the Big Guy as a substitute dad, but only knows Lt. Dwayne as the Big Guy’s “chief mechanic.” Lt. Dwayne initially dismisses Rusty as an unfinished technology, but grows to trust and feel for the “Boy Robot,” both when inside and outside the Big Guy suit.

This central relationship, along with those of a strong human supporting cast, carry the series through 26 installments that unfold as chapters in a novel (like the best anime shows). But Fox, desperate for a quick ratings fix in the Pokemon-dominated 1999 cartoon season, dropped TBG&R after only six installments had aired. The network’s been “burning off” the entire series in a spring-and-summer run this year. Its ratings this time have apparently been OK, but the show’s creative staff has dispersed to other projects and a second season is apparently unlikely.

But the shows that were made work well as a complete “work,” with a beginning and end. In between are some episodes that work as stand-alone adventures with foes (and friends) of assorted alien origin, some episodes that explore the relationship between the real robot and the fake one, and some episodes involving a set of recurring villains, the Legion Ex Machina (evil, real robots out to eradicate the human race).

In the last episode, the Big Guy’s original chief designer is seen for the first time. He claims the Big Guy had been “a failure” because it depended on a human pilot; even though the man-in-a-suit had successfully fought off countless bug-eyed alien monsters and destroyed the Legion.

Similarly, Fox treated TBG&R as a failed show. But it’s really a success. At a time when primetime “reality” shows are pulling the lowest common denominator ever lower (even lower than is possible with scripted fiction shows, which must maintain a minimal story credibility to work on a weekly basis), TBG&R is a highest-common-denominator show.

Its premise is full of holes (if the Big Guy is so important to Earth’s survival, why was only one ever built and why does it have only one trained pilot?).

But the characters (even the bad guys) are fully developed, the storylines fully explore the complexities of these characters, the scripts are smart without succumbing to overt “hip” attitude nonsense, and the artwork (all done in traditional cel animation) is often spectacular.

See it while you still can.

Yeah, this is another piece about the Seattle mayoral election, whose primary round is three weeks away as of today.

Specifically, it’s about a very strange event last night at A Contemporary Theatre, a performance-art circus billed as a candidates’ forum on arts and cultural issues. How strange was it? KIRO-TV news guy Mike James was overheard saying, “This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”

It started normally enough, with 50 or so protesters staging a sit-in in front of ACT, criticizing city attorney/mayoral candidate Mark Sidran’s “civility laws,” including his ban on sitting on city sidewalks.

But the event inside got off-script once fringe candidate Richard Lee (producer-host of the cable access show Kurt Cobain Was Murdered) stepped on stage, wearing a dress and holding a video camcorder aimed at his own face.

For the next two hours, no matter what question the moderator (James’s former KING colleague Lori Matsukawa) asked, Lee spent his alloted minutes and longer repeating the same rant–that he has supposed proof that Cobain was assassinated (or at least might have been), that city and county officials (including the three candidates at the forum currently in government employ) are involved in a cover-up conspiracy, and that anyone who declines to play along with his verbal attacks is also part of the conspiracy.

In one evening of tiresome theatrics, Lee destroyed any remaining credibility in himself or his “crusade.”

Worse, he made Sidran look sane.

Notwithstanding Lee’s histrionics, the forum’s other six candidates also frequently strayed from the questions at hand, into pre-prepared hype statements.

Sidran, smug and grating as ever, made his usual buzzwords about “civility” and “strong leadership.” His answer to a question about high housing costs pushing artists and arts groups out of town: Give more “incentives” (read: subsidies) to private developers, and improve the highways so it would be easier to push the non-wealthy out to Kent and Shoreline.

Incumbent Paul Schell and front-running challenger Greg Nickels made nearly identical, nearly meaningless smooth talk about supporting the arts as harbingers of cultural diversity in a cosmopolitan city at the dawn of a new millennium and so forth. The big difference between the two: Schell defended his veto of changes to the hated Teen Dance Ordinance, while Nickels called for new initiatives to promote safe live shows for under-21s.

Omari Tahir-Garrett, out on bail after charged with hitting Schell with a megaphone in July, repeatedly brought every response back to a call to recognize the problems of minorities, especially minority youth. Such statements, by themselves, would’ve been good toward reclaiming his credibility within the Af-Am community–but he usually segued straight from that line into his personal cause, the proposed African American Academy project that’s been years in the making and was taken out of his hands.

(This is an admittedly incomplete telling of what’s really a long story. Tahir-Garrett’s career, and his relationship within local black leadership, is much more complicated than that.)

Scott Kennedy, one of the two liberal-progressives in the race, showed up late and kept promoting his non-politician status. He insisted that as a small businessman, a rock musician, and a friend and colleage of artists and arts organizers, he’d be more sympathetic to the arts than other candidates, but didn’t specifically propose much on their behalf.

Charlie Chong, the race’s other left-of-center guy, was soft-spoken and down-to-earth, and stayed the closest to the topics of Matsukawa’s questions. Then, in his closing statement, he called himself an “anti-establishment candidate,” humorously said that a Seattle under Sidran would be like a Stephen King horror movie and a Seattle under Nickels would be like “four years of Bonanza reruns” (a probable reference to The Stranger nicknaming Nickels “Hoss” during the 1997 election), and apparently offerred his support to Schell, whom Chong fought hard against in ’97.

Yes, things can get weirder still. And they probably will.

Thanks to Comedy Central, I just realized the perfect fictional portrayal of George W. Bush, decades before the fact–Charles Grodin’s act as a Saturday Night Live guest host who, in a running-gag storyline, didn’t realize it was live and didn’t show up until the day of the show. The gag climaxed with Grodin stumbling through a fake public-service ad, “Hire the Incompetent.”

ELSEWHERE:

“Instant Ramen–The Invention That Changed the 20th Century World” (found by Larkfarm).

The amazing breadth and scope of Yugoslav cuss words….

A New York Post story claimed British comic playwrights are planning an opera based on The Jerry Springer Show. The story explains that “Springer enjoys immense popularity in England, where he was born to parents who survived the Holocaust.” Not only is his US show exported there, but he flies to London every other week to host a late-night variety show.

This may explain the particularities of the Springer show’s cast of freaks (real Americans with assorted “relationship issues,” who are chosen by the producers for their weirdness and coached to exaggerate outrageous behaviors onstage).

The Springer show, it’s now obvious, is a show made for export. It’s clearly devised to serve up a British/Euro vision of white Americans as uncouth louts, ignorant trailer trash bereft of either common sense or dignity–but mightily entertaining.

Not far from some white Americans’ vision of black Americans.

MTV celebrated its 20th anniversary yesterday with 13 hours of oldies videos, displaying such now-novel sights as rappers who were actually black and women who actually played instruments.

VH1’s list of the “100 Most Shocking Moments In Rock & Roll” didn’t include anything involving Buddy Holly, Bobby Fuller, Brian Jones, Eric Clapton’s racist remarks, Ronald Reagan pretending to have heard of Bruce Springsteen, $200 concert tickets, or the use of Janis Joplin’s Mercedez-Benz song in an awful real Mercedes commercial. (Cobain’s death was ranked #4 on the list.)

ELSEWHERE:

A story about White House plumbing that has nothing to do with Watergate.

Whatever happenned to UFO sightings? (found by Fark)

Spyder Games is, beyond a doubt, the weirdest series MTV has ever aired–for the mere reason that MTV is airing it.

To wit (or, in this case, witless): If the 130-part youth-appeal soap opera had been on some other cable channel (such as Oxygen or Lifetime) or in broadcast-channel syndication, it would clearly be nothing more or less than the poorly-written, poorly-acted, shot-on-video mediocrity it is.

But by being on MTV, where everything’s allegedly so slick and quick and hot, the show’s wooden acting and cardboard sets take on a nearly surrealistic tone. It’s as if the channel’s top brass had finally realized that 20 years of incessant, aggressive programming (not to mention five years of hyping awful boy bands and all-white gangsta rappers) have made it a spent force among wide swaths of its target audience–a Dawson’s Creek generation with little interest in a Beavis and Butt-head aesthetic.

So Spyder Games doesn’t try to be hip–or rather, whenever it tries to be hip it fails miserably, making its fundamental squareness even more apparent. The rock band some of the characters have is relentlessly average. The costumes are off-the-shelf mall-chain recreations of the worst ’80s-style homeliness. The dialogue makes no discernable attempt at contempo slang. The storylines are supposedly about hidden family secrets, but in detail are nearly incomprehensible to first-time viewers.

In other words, it’s a standard regular-issue daytime soap, differentiated from the network fare only in that (1) it’s more incompenetly made, and (2) it will end after 26 weeks, like a Mexican telenovela.

To compare and contrast, MTV’s running the second season of its Undressed serial after some showings of Spyder Games. Undressed features perky college kids, stripped to their glamorous undies as often as possible, chattering on about sex and relationships. (In keeping with today’s reversed double standards, the gals are usually the ones obsessed with sex while the guys want to pontificate about relationships.) Everybody’s “beautiful” and stylish, and the show uses that muddy digital process to make video supposedly look like film.

Neither show is very good, or very entertaining. But despite (or because of) its incessant hotness, Undressed already seems more dated than last year’s Victoria’s Secret catalog; while Spyder Games, invoking 50 years of TV soap opera histrionics, is a relative evergreen.

The All-Star Game was a game that didn’t count in any standings, but was a nearly flawless example of what a great baseball game can be. Ichiro battled the Big Unit and won; Seattle pitchers got the win and the save; and fan-favorite Cal RIpken got the MVP trophy. All it lacked was 2001-Mariners style clutch hit-and-run play.

However, one piece of KCPQ’s postgame hype show struck me–the part where the pretty-girl and pretty-boy anchorbots lavished praise on the event as the civic-pride booster Seattle’s needed ever since WTO, Mardi Gras, and the bopping of a megaphone into the mayor’s forehead. Yeah, like anybody was expecting a riot at an exhibition game that charged hundreds for standing-room tix.

ELSEWHERE:

Great ’60s and ’70s View-Master disc covers.

A recent emigrant from here to there offers “An American’s Guide to Canada” (found by Pop Culture Junk Mail).

Now we know why Playboy TV reinvented itself with raunch-talk and porn-queen celebrity profiles, as noted in the previous item.

Turns out the channel’s been clobbered in subscription enrollment and cable-system carriage, first by the censored hardcore porn of the Spice Channel (which Playboy bought) and then by the more minimally censored hardcore porn of the Hot Network (which Playboy chose not to take over at the time of the Spice acquisition, but is buying now). When it comes to costly and unsatisfying 2-D substitutes for actual sex, the lonely-guy audience of America prefers the lewd ‘n’ crude over the comparatively soft and feminine.

Then there’s the phallus factor. AT&T Broadband can get away with charging $2 more for a Hot Network pay-per-view feature than for the slightly more discreet edit of the same production on Playboy or Spice. That’s because enough officially-hetero men crave the sight of other men’s parts in action.

A year or two ago I thought this portended some great change in men’s attitudes toward other men’s bodies, and might eventually lead to a more gender-equitable, less homophobic society. Now I don’t know if it means anything.

Saw a day’s worth of Playboy TV the other week, for the first time since ’94.

Back then, the channel presented a hermetically-sealed fantasy world built around the parent magazine’s carefully-crafted Playmate stock character–slickly “beautiful,” bereft of imperfection or personality, a supremely non-threatening ideal for post-adolescent readers lacking in sexual self-confidence. The magazine’s cable operation carried over this fleshless flesh and passionless eroticism, as best as its budget allowed, with a low-key, “friedly” lineup of centerfold videos and softcore movies.

That’s all changed. The channel now apparently wants to be as raunchy as possible without unduly tarnishing the Playboy brand image or jeopardizing its relationship with the cable companies that carry it. So it now carries “celebrity profiles” of porn stars (complete with lightly censored scenes from their works), travelogues to lap-dance clubs, and call-in shows in which the male callers talk lewd-‘n’-crude to nude female hosts showing off what they coyly call their “meat wallets.” Even the centerfold videos, which used to strictly show the models cavorting alone in pastoral settings, now feature them in soft-focus fake sex scenes.

Today’s Playboy TV is as dumb as yesterday’s, but in different ways. The old Playboy TV was almost numbingly bland. The new Playboy TV is a hackneyed visualization of some of shock-talk radio’s worst cliches, especially in the overabundance of capital-A Attitude.

But it’s also got an energy the old Playboy TV never had, an enthusiasm about itself and its primary topic. The fantasy world depicted by the new Playboy TV is one in which everybody (with the possible exception of you) is having outrageous, consensual, mutually gratifying, sweat-inducing sex just about all the time; sex that never, ever leads to STDs, unwanted pregnancies, or emotional relationship turmoil.

It’s a fantasy based on a different ideal of sexiness–not the soft-smiling, reassuring traditional Playmate image but the sassy, perky strip-club or porn-video goddess, a woman who might superficially look like a bimbo but who’s clearly focused and determined, bearing an unstoppable drive to sell, sell, sell.

A perfect sex-symbol depiction for the age of hyper-marketing.

Seattle’s annual Gay Pride Parade (officially, the “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Parade, March, and Freedom Rally”) long ago ceased to be a niche-subculture celebration.

Today it has only slightly more specifically-gay meaning than the modern St. Patrick’s Day has specifically-Irish meaning.

It’s become the day when everybody claims or pretends to be, if not a proud queer, at least a proud friend of proud queers.

The floats, performance troups, and marching units of actual lesbians and gays (and their support groups) are heavily interspersed with those of officially gay-friendly corporations (Microsoft), marketers (KUBE-FM, Starbucks, lots of beer companies), and politicians major and minor.

Why, even petty-tyrant-wannabe mayoral candidate Mark Sidran showed up to aggressively shake everyone’s hands, whether folks wanted their hands shook or not. (Sidran was accompanied by a small entourage holding up yard signs, whose logo bore a loud rightward-pointing arrow).

Some gays might consider this mainstreaming as a sign that gays and gay rights are increasingly accepted in American society, yea even among the power brokers of business and politics.

But other gay activists, who’d dreamed their liberation movement would lead to a larger public questioning of the so-called “dominant culture,” have branded such mainstreamed celebrations with such terms as “assimilationist.”

They allege that the organizers of rituals such as Seattle’s Pride Parade are helping destroy not just the larger queer-lib political agenda but the distinct GLBT subculture.

I can leave such distinctions to those within the community.

But I can say that the overall trend in this country is for more subcultures and social niches, not fewer. Even within LGBT there are subgroups (gay men, lesbians, bis, M2F trannies, F2M trannies, cross-dressers, etc.) and sub-subgroups (bears, leather, butch, femme, etc.) and sub-sub-subgroups (too numerous to even sample).

That’s one of the aspects of the Pride Parade’s smiling, family-friendly homosexuality that helps make it so appealing to so many straights.

Thousands of Americans who’ve never been erotically attracted to someone of the same gender wish they could belong to a subculture like GLBT; though preferably without the job-discrimination and general bigotries so many real GLBTs face.

And I don’t just mean those urban-hipster straight women who think it’s cool to pretend to be bi, or those college-town straight men who wish they could be as sanctimonious as radical lesbians.

We’re all “queer” in one way or another, in the older and larger definition of the term. We’re all different, from one another and from any dictated vision of “normality.”

And we all have a sexuality; and many of us wish (at least secretly) that we could be part of a culture in which we could proudly proclaim our sexual selves, without fear of being branded as sluts or chauvanist pigs or unfit parents.

Postscript: The night before the parade, Showtime ran Sex With Strangers, a documentary by Joe and Harry Gantz about three couples (two from Olympia), and the bi-female “friend” of one of them, who are all in the swingers’ lifestyle. The closing “where are they now” titles revealed that three of the seven individual protagonists had lost their jobs after their nonmonogamies became known. (The other four were either self-employed or were now on “extended vacations.”) The lesson: You don’t have to be gay to need the more progressive social attitudes gay-lib promotes.

Post-postscript: The loneliest-looking entry in the Pride Parade was the car sponsored by the Capitol Hill Alano Club, with its plain signage, few passengers, and fewer attending marchers. The 12-Step group was almost directly followed by a succession of beer-company vans and trucks (even a delivery semi rig).

Dave Winer’s long-running (in Net-years) DaveNet column recently suggested a “corporate death penalty,” the government-mandated dissolving of companies found guilty of major offenses.

“For example,” Winer writes, “I would have put Exxon to death for the Valdez disaster, to set an example for other would-be rapers of the environment.”

Winer has yet to detail how this might be carried out (government seizure and auction of assets, perhaps?). But he has suggested it’d be the ideal answer to the Microsoft monopoly. Instead of splitting MS up into two firms, “after the death penalty, there would be zero Microsofts, not two.”

There’s a precedent for this in Britain, under the old tradition of crown-chartered corporations (such as the still-extant Hudson’s Bay Co.) existing on the government’s bidding and subject to periodic review and non-automatic renewal.

The modern-day example of this is Britain’s oldest commercial TV network, ITV. As I oh-so-briefly explained recently, ITV was devised as a loose consortium of local stations, with no central corporate management save for the heavy hand of their government regulator, originally known as the Independent Television Authority (ITA). The ITA built and ran the transmitters, then contracted out the programming and ad sales on these stations to 15 different companies. The contracts were for limited terms (four to eight years) and their renewal was not automatic. The ITA would re-hire, fire, or force mergers among contractor companies for any combination of reasons, from financial solvency to programming priorities. Thus major operators such as ATV/ITC (producers of The Prisoner and The Muppet Show), Associated British Corp. (The Avengers), Rediffusion (Ready Steady Go!), and Thames Television (The Benny Hill Show) have come and gone from the ITV airwaves over the years.

Of course the US has always had a more libertarian attitude toward the sacred rights of business than the pre-Thatcher UK. Today’s American regulatory system luuuvs gigantic media conglomerates and other global business giants. To even put teeth back into US business oversight (let alone fangs) would require a far bigger change in Congress than one centrist Republican turning into a centrist Democrat.

Singles to Jingles

by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn

IN THIS WACKY WORLD, TV ads create the music hits.

The radio stations wouldn’t touch Sting’s new album, but suddenly got bombarded with requests for his new song after the Jaguar commercial aired. So now we have greedy and artless ad execs chosing our records for us (rather than greedy and artless radio producers).

Then there is Moby, who deserves brief mention, since he sold every song on his album Play to advertisers. The Chemical Brothers sold out to Nike, but most horrible of all is, of course, the old Nair commercial that some how got the rights to “Short Shorts.”

This leaves us with the obvious question: Is there any dignity left?

I wonder if it has anything to do with 100 TV channels, or the MTV generation, or the gradual coorporate overtake of the music industry, or… oh whatever! Truth is, when this generation gets older, our favorite songs, the anthems of our generation, will be fuel for Rolaids, Paxil, and feminine itch products.

Here are some possible ads we may see in the future:

• Britney Spears, “Oops, I Did It Again”: Adult diapers.
• Nirvana, “Come As You Are”: Viagra.
• Jay-Z, “Can I Get A…”: Visa (“Whoop whoop” will be replaced with “Gold card”).
• Quarterflash, “I’m Gonna Harden My Heart”: Anti-diarrhea medicine (“Heart” replaced by the word “Stool”).
• Ben Folds Five, “She’s a Brick and I’m Drowning Slowly”: Anti-constipation medicine.
• No Doubt, “Don’t Speak”: Hallmark (“Don’t tell me cause it hurts” replaced by “Say it with Hallmark cards”).
• Ramones, “I Wanna Be Sedated”: Bladder-control medication (much better than the “Gotta Go” jingle).
• Mudhoney, “Touch Me, I’m Sick”: Paxil, the social anxiety disorder pill.
• PiL, “Rise”: Microsoft (“May the road rise with you” replaced by “Where do you wanna go today?”).
• Coldplay, “Yellow”: Ultra Brite toothpaste (“Look at my teeth, look how they shine for you… Yeah, they’re not yellow”).
• Sheryl Crowe, “You Oughta Know”: Ford (“Know” replaced by “Own… (a Ford truck)”).
• Blink 182, “What’s My Age Again?”: Erectile-dysfunction medication.
• Prince, “Little Red Corvette”: Dentu Grip denture adhesive (“Little red Corvette, baby you’re much too fast” replaced by “A little Dentu Grip, baby it sticks so fast”).
• Eminem, “Slim Shady”: Norelco Slim Lady shaver (“…All you other slim shavers are just imitatin”).
• Soundgarden, “Black Hole Sun”: Hemorrhoid medicine.
• Madonna, “Papa Don’t Preach”: Clorox bleach (song becomes a plea from daughter to father not to over-wash the clothes, “preach” replaced by “bleach”).
• Sir Mix-A-Lot, “Baby Got Back”: Ford (“I like big butts” replaced by “I like big trucks”).
• ‘N Sync, “Bye Bye”: The Bon Marche (word “Bye” replaced with “Buy” and “Day-O” gets a rest).
• Assorted Artists, “We Are the World”: Coke (all the actual artists (still living) will perform it, replaceing, “We are the children” with “We are the Coke drinkers”).
• U2, “Bloody Sunday”: Motrin, menstrual cramp relief.
• Tears for Fears, “Shout”: Shout stain remover (“Shout, shout, get it all out, these are the stains we can live without…”).
• Moby, “Trouble”: Roto Rooter, Desinex for jock itch and athletes foot, and Gynolotrimin (they are the only ones left who haven’t bought it yet).

TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to the memory of Morris Graves, last of the ’50s “Northwest Mystic” painters and a continued inspiration even to diehard urban skeptics such as myself.

SOME OF THE THINGS I’VE BEEN DOING in recent weeks, instead of finishing up the transformation of this site to that popular “weblog” format:

• Continued to work on the new book, tentatively titled City Light: A Personal View of Seattle. New picture-taking is on a temporary hold while I work on laying out a pitch package to potential investors.
• Prepared the big photo-show debut for June 2 (see our last entry).
• Wrote about Cobain for History Link, the acclaimed local history site. The article should be up later this summer, in plenty of time for the 10th anniversary of Nevermind‘s release.
• Got interviewed by BBC television. They’ve got a big ’90s documentary show in the works, and wanted my opinions on that “Seattle Music Scene” craze and other period trends.

  They sat me down for an hour with a Betacam camera and a chroma-key blue screen in a Westin Hotel meeting room. I gave the usual shtick on the rise of Cobain and co. (Refreshingly, they were interested in Nirvana’s music and indie-rock philosophy, not the Cobain-Love celebrity circus or the drug tragedy.)

  While I was miked up, I also answered questions about the movie Slacker (the product of a highly un-slacker-esque DIY-culture aesthetic), the continuing success of Nintendo’s Super Mario character (putting him in ever-bigger worlds only enhances his feisty-little-guy appeal), “designer grunge” fashion (I pleaded with viewers not to blame anyone in Seattle for it), and that way-overused term “Generation X” (the BBC producer was unaware that it originally came from a 1964 British book).

  I’ve no idea when the show will air in Britain, whether it will ever appear Stateside, or whether any of my comments will make the final cut.

• Entered into negotiations with a certain local print periodical to have more of my work out to the modemless public (no firm deal yet though).

NEXT: In the Seattle upscale monoculture, everybody’s white (including the blacks).

ELSEWHERE:

• How to create your own pseudo-Korn band (found by /usr/bin/grl)….