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EVEN THOUGH I’M NOT, and am not even related to, the guy who still writes “I Love Television,” I still defend the medium from its more strident and less thoughtful bashers.
Among those are the promoters of something called “Turn Off TV Week,” going on now.
I am just so darned tired of these decades-old (and oversimplified even then) arguments that Reading Is Always Good and Viewing Is Always Bad.
There’s nothing intrinsically empowering or progressive or even truthful about The Book. Mein Kampf was a book. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a book. The Memoirs of Richard Nixon was a book. Heck, even some of the most horrid movies ever made (Donovan’s Brain, Forrest Gump) were originally books.
And in the supposed Golden Age Before Television, what were some of America’s favorite mass entertainments? Adventure pulp magazines (lurid covers, bland formulaic insides). Sensationalistic Hearst newspapers. Underground “Tijuana bible” mini-comics. I happen to adore all of these ephemera, despite (or at least partly because of) their classic-showbiz energy and their lack of intellectual pretension.
Meanwhile, the audiovisual medium all conformist hippies and rote radicals obediently hate has recently given us endless numbing hours of impeachment, Elian, and celeb divorces (not to mention the Fox News Channel’s nattering ninnies); but also such quite smarty fare as Malcolm in the Middle, The Big Guy and Rusty, (the original) Law and Order, The Awful Truth, The Drew Carey Show, BBC America’s world news, BET On Jazz’s Live from the Knitting Factory, etc. etc. etc.
Heck, even PBS has something smart on every once in a while.
Smartness and/or dumbness can be found most anywhere, in most any medium. (Though the smartness half of the equation is increasingly hard to find at chain-owned radio stations, but that’s a rant for another time.)
NEXT: On a similar note, a eulogy for a Net radio favorite.
IN OTHER NEWS: I’ve continued to delay the transformation of this site’s main page to the increasingly popular “welbog” format. Still haven’t figured out how to replicate all the page’s features in one of those scripted weblog programs.
ELSEWHERE:
JOHN KEISTER’S COMEBACK SHOW, The John Report With Bob, has apparently been canceled by KIRO-TV. No announcement has been made; the show simply went into a month of reruns, after which Sheena appeared suddenly in its time slot and the show’s website went offline.
A little history: KING-TV started a weekly comedy-talk hour called Almost Live! back in ’84. It had interviews, a live band, stand-up comics, an opening monologue, and pre-taped sketches by a tight ensemble of actor-writers. The affable Ross Shafer hosted it for four years, then quit to try his luck in Hollywood. The host’s slot was assigned to my ol’ UW Daily pal Keister (who’d appeared in sketches on the show and its one-season precursor R.E.V., after having been on the original Rocket writing staff).
Keister hosted the show in Shafer’s format for a year. Then KING (once a rather intelligent organization) had the great idea to revamp the show around its strengths (Keister’s deadpan-goof persona and the ensemble’s sketch characterizations), dumping the music and talk. It was turned into a tightly formatted half-hour and slotted right before Saturday Night Live (the station got special permission from NBC to delay SNL by 30 minures).
It was a smash, and became a local institution. One cast member, Bill Nye, even got his own national educational show, on which he used many AL cast and crew members.
By mid-1999, however, the TV landscape had changed. New cable and broadcast channels had whittled away at the ratings of network affiliates such as KING, which got sold twice. The station’s new media-conglomerate owners found no use for a relatively expensive local entertainment show (KING’s last production to use non-robotic studio cameras).
Once the non-compete clause of Keister’s KING contract expired, he signed on with KIRO. At first he promised something as close to Almost Live! as was possible, considering only Bob Nelson from the old show’s cast came over with him.
But Keister’s KIRO show was too much like Almost Live! with a new cast to succeed. It felt like the Oxygen cable channel’s dreary remake of the classic game show I’ve Got A Secret, or like a community theater production of a classic play.
That last statement is not intended to disparge the new show’s cast members. All are fine comic actors. But there were too many of them for a real ensemble chemistry to develop, and their improvisational strengths were often lost in a scripted format.
Besides, the premise of a parody newscast has been done to death. And real newscasts have become so ridiculous lately, there might be nothing left for the genre’s would-be satirists to deconstruct.
Still, I like Keister and Nelson (and many of the new cast members, especially Mike Daisey). I want them on a new show. I want there to be locally-produced entertainment on Seattle commercial TV.
My suggestion has two words: Sabado Gigante.
Like Univision’s Miami-based, Spanish-language signature series, Keister’s next show should be a high-profile, high-energy affair. It should be an hour long and repeated at least once a week, maximizing ad-sales opportunities. Instead of filling its non-sketch minutes with static interview spots a la the Shafer version of AL, it should develop a mix of audience-participation games, guest variety and performance-art acts, live bands, and funny human-interest taped pieces. And like SG, it should have in-studio commercials (my recommended spokesmodels: Miss Intermission (from Theater Schmeater’s old Twilight Zone stage shows) and DJ Leslie $ (local retro-culture queen)).
I’m firmly convinced this format would work, if executed by Keister and the core John Report With Bob team, and if a station gave these folks enough on-air time to adjust these elements into their proper proportions.
And if a station in today’s ambition-fearing TV biz was willing to put it on in the first place.
NEXT: What Joey Ramone meant to me.
OUR PROBLEM COULD BE YOUR OPPORTUNITY.
We’ve got about three dozen copies of Loser that got hurt in, or on their way to, bookstores. They don’t have any faults that would make them any less enjoyable, only less saleable (little bends on the cover, scratches on the spine, etc.) (I know, I know, people have been calling me slightly bent for years, but that’s not the issue here.)
These books have gotta go, and we’re willing to let ’em go cheap. If you already have the 1995 edition, this is your chance to get the new material in the update chapters. If you haven’t yet obtained your own copy of the most complete history ever written about the Seattle rock-music scene, here’s your best chance.
Deal #1: Start or renew a subscription to MISCmedia the print magazine, at $15 a year, and get a slightly-hurt but still ultimately readable Loser for just $10 more (yep, that’s a grand total of $25 US, postpaid.)
Deal #2: Not quite as great a deal as Deal #1, but still worth your trouble. Get an almost-imperceptibly blemished Loser on its own for $14 US postpaid, a whole third off the normal price for a perfect copy.
NEXT: Are self-published books any worse, on the average, than self-released CDs?
IN OTHER NEWS: The wrestling biz plays Monopoly, with WWF taking over onetime arch-rival WCW. Several readers tell me I should care about this.
THIS EDITION OF MISCmedia is dedicated to the memory of William Hanna, whose TV cartoons entranced millions of kids (and whose early, low-budget shows helped demystify the animation and filmmaking processes for thousands of those kids).
AS YOU MAY HAVE HEARD BY NOW, the Boeing Co. announced one of its periodic reorganizations the other day.
It’s gonna group its own heritage assets, and the assets it’s bought from Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, and General Motors into three main groups, each of which would act more like a stand-alone company with its own management and offices (and, potentially, its own “tracking stock” IPO). At the top would be a slimmed-down corporate headquarters–which won’t be in Seattle (or St. Louis or Long Beach, where two of the three operating groups will be based).
So Boeing’s gonna become just another rootless global corporation, and have a head office not where any of its main plants are but whereever it can wring “job blackmail” deals from the local authorities and/or wherever the top execs would prefer to live.
The official reason given, that the company needs to be based someplace with “cultural diversity” and “a pro-business climate,” is, as everyone here knows, B.S. Our local and state politicians have spent their collective professional lifetimes doing whatever the Lazy B wanted. And as for the diversity part, there’s a whole world out in Seattle’s neighborhoods and suburbs that the Coldwater Creek store and the other promoters of Demographic Correctness couldn’t even imagine.
So let’s imagine the potential real reasons:
By having a head office physically removed from all manufacturing operations, Boeing’s proclaiming itself to the stock markets and the corporate community that it’s gonna be a company run by salespeople and financiers for salespeople and financiers, not an “old economy” company making specific products for specific customers. It’ll be a company whose real “bottom line” isn’t its operating profit but its stock price. A company that’ll do anything for the sake of short-term upturns–even take moves that could sacrifice its long-term position (such as giving away wing-design technology to the Japanese).
And if the top execs move to Texas, they’ll have more potential clout when pushing new military contracts from a Texan-run White House.
One potentially ironic note was that the top brass had apparently been bitching among themselves about all the flying around they had to do to go from Seattle to other Boeing sites and to Washington, DC lobbying sessions. (If you don’t like airline travel, guys, get into some other line of work than trying to promote more airline travel.)
NEXT: Some more of this.
ONE OF THE NET’S first writer-success stories is Aaron Barnhart.
Back in the Iron Age of online communication (circa 1993-94), Barnhart started a weekly e-mailed column, Late Show News, covering late-night TV with a particular David Letterman emphasis.
Barnhart’s searing, witty, and attitude-free insights got him a cult following that led to freelance assignments for “real” print publications, and eventually to his getting a job as TV critic for the Kansas City Star.
Barnhart’s been dealing with leukemia lately, and talks frankly about it at his TV Barn site.
Among his comments is his personal experience with the kind of genetic-based therapies whose early unperfected forms, and their associated tragic human clinical trials, were the topic of last week’s Seattle Times long investigative series.
The Times stories repeatedly depict the therapies Hutch studied, and the trials thereof, as one big horrible disaster, spurred not by scientific inquiry but by the financial interest held by the Hutch and some of its physicians in the products being studied.
But Barnhart (whose paper is owned by Knight-Ridder, which owns 49.5 percent of the Times) notes on his site that if it weren’t for those crude, early versions of the therapies, the more perfected versions he’s using wouldn’t have been developed.
Yes, many people died in the Hutch’s early tests. But many of them would have died from their cancers anyway. And it’s because of what the Hutch and other institutions learned from those tests that the current therapies are around to help prolong the life of one of my favorite online writers.
The remaining issue raised by the Times series is whether patients in the clinical trials knew how experiemental and risky their treatments were. Based on his experience, Barnhart writes that that’s an issue endemic to the whole medical-research industry, not just to the Hutch.
NEXT: Tell me a story.
LAST TIME, we discussed the growing backlash against the major record labels.
This time, a look at how the labels, and other marketers, are trying to get kids to like them in spite of it all.
Last week, PBS’s Frontline documentary series ran a show called The Merchants of Cool. Narrated by anti-major-media activist and author Douglas Rushkoff, it explored how MTV, the labels, soft drink companies, shoe companies, etc. are trying to make huge bucks from the biggest teenage generation in North American history.
The show’s first shock was the very presence of adolescent faces on PBS, which normally ignores the existence of U.S. citizens older than 12 and younger than 50.
The second was the relative even-handedness of Rushkoff’s argument; especially his assertion that real-life teens are, on the whole, probably not really as crude or stupid as the “rebel” stereotypes advertisers sell at them (labeled by Rushkoff as the rude, potty-mouthed “Mook” male and the hypersexual “Midriff” female).
Not surprising at all, for a viewer familiar with Rushkoff’s books, was his conclusion that corporations will do anything to make a buck, even if it involves trampling on any authentic youth culture and treating their own would-be customers as idiots. What’s surprising about this is that he got to say it on PBS–which, like most bigtime American media, seldom has a bad word to say about American business.
In this instance, though, the “public” network might have had a self-interest point to make.
Perhaps it wanted viewers to distrust the media conglomerates, such as those who own most of the commercial broadcast and cable networks, as a way to imply that it, PBS, was the programming choice worried parents could trust (even though it has very little specifically teen-oriented programming)?
But then again, as I’ve often said, I’m no conspiracy theorist.
IN OTHER NEWS: The OK Hotel building won’t be torn down; the quake damage wasn’t even halfway bad enough to revoke its landmark-preservation status. But the music club within has indeed been permanently evicted. Owners Steve and Tia Freeborn say they’ll try to look for a new space somewhere, and might try to promote one-off shows at existing spots in the interim. I was there the night before that last Fat Tuesday night, and was also there yesterday to see the staff start to clean the place out. (Pix forthcoming.)
NEXT: The end of our little fashion-makeover parable.
NINE YEARS OR SO AGO, Courtney Love may have been the personally least popular figure in the then-Red Hot Seattle Music Scene.
In a town that prized politeness and personability above all other traits (even among punk rockers!), Love was defiantly brash, unapologetically careerist, and defiantly self-promoting.
She would’ve been (and was) unpopular among many here and in her former Portland digs, even without the ludicrously false allegations a few guys made against her concerning hubby Kurt Cobain’s drug addiction and suicide. (I believe she’d tried to save him as best she could, but he was too far gone.)
One of her most outspoken schticks was her embracing of Rock Star glamour. While many local musicians (particularly among Cobain’s indie-rock activist pals in Olympia) treated small-scale DIY music as a religion, Love rode in limos, put on (and took off) designer fashions, hobnobbed with celebrities, moved to LA and became a movie star.
So, despite her deliberately generated reputation for hot-headedness, she’s just about the last one I’d have expected to (1) publicly denounce the major record labels, and (2) put her career on the line in order to do so.
She’s suing Vivendi Universal (nee MCA) Records to get out of her recording contract. More importantly, she insists she’s not out to just quietly settle the suit for her own personal gain, but to overturn the major labels’ whole stranglehold on recording artists’ careers and livelihoods.
The corporate record labels’ litany of sins is surely one you’ve heard often, by everyone from Calvin Johnson to Prince.
Artists get signed with big up-front “advances” that actually put them in debt to the labels, and bind them to the labels for as much as seven albums which could encompass their entire careers (while the labels can drop the acts at any time).
The artists are liable against royalty payments for everything the labels spend on their behalf, and are at the mercy of the labels’ marketing effectiveness and all-too-frequent corporate reorganizations and staff turnovers.
If a label opts to give a particular artist low promotion priority, or wastes money charged to an artist on excessive video-production budgets or on drugs-and-hookers bribery to radio stations, an artist can do little or nothing about it.
Even if an artist gets released from a bad major-label deal, s/he has little choice but to accept another bad deal from another major label.
The indie-label resurgence (particularly in the hiphop, alterna-rock, and techno-dance genres) gave some folk a glimmer of hope that this dilemma could be changed, but also a few sobering examples of just how hard it can be to go up against the majors for radio play, record-store shelf space, etc.
Net-based marketing schemes provided additional hopes for musicians to sidestep the majors’ stranglehold (though the first successful online-sold CDs were by already established acts).
Then the Napster craze, and the labels’ litigous response to it, further exposed the majors’ double-faced attitude and money- and power-hogging tactics.
There’s enough popular opinion out there against the entertainment conglomerates that some industry observers say Love’s suit might just succeed at forcing the labels to give up some of their worst contractual practices.
But will it succeed at rehabilitating Love’s reputation among the street-level music community? Only time will tell.
IN OTHER NEWS: Rumors continue to swirl concerning the fate of the OK Hotel, the legendary music club in an historic Pioneer Square building that was hurt in last week’s quake. Unconfirmed tales currently allege the building owner wants to use the quake as an excuse to raze the whole thing for parking. Further details as they become available.
NEXT: PBS discovers marketing to teens.
MANY OF YOU already know this, but I just discovered it recently: They’ve gone and re-edited the old episodes of Red Dwarf, the BBC’s sci-fi sitcom.
When RD began in the late ’80s, it could be seen as the opposite of Doctor Who, the BBC’s long-running shot-on-video space opera, which at the time was slowly spiraling toward its demise after 26 seasons of low-budget heroics.
Where the often-recast Doctor was a do-gooder genius and all-around take-charge guy, RD’s protagonist Lister was a drifter in character and in plot. He was stuck in an old mining ship millions of years in the future, capable only of reacting to events outside his control. He hopes to somehow get back to his own time but is repeatedly thwarted–often by his fellow passengers Rimmer (a hologram of a dead shipmate), Kryten (a moping android), Holly (the ship’s computer voice), and Cat (a humanoid distantly descended from Earth house cats).
But that comparison alone doesn’t explain the show’s enduring appeal, to sci-fi fanatics and to PBS pledge-drive callers. RD is no mere space-opera parody. It’s a real comedy show that happens to take place on a spaceship. That’s why its video look is as important as its studio-audience laugh track. It’s not a send-up or an attack on the space-opera genre. It respects the form’s conventions, even as it plays them for farce.
RD originally ran for six seasons (only six to eight shows per season, the customary quota with most BBC “Britcoms”). Four years later, continued demand on both sides of the Atlantic (and, apparently, a possible movie deal) brought the show back into production for at least two more batches of episodes. The new shows were shot on film, with significantly slicker production values and special effects; as if to prove to potential film investors that the show’s humor would still work on an expanded “stage.”
But at the same time, they went back and re-edited the old shows. They added fancier FX to some scenes, and digitally altered the video footage with that clumsy Filmlook process that makes everything look dingy and hazy. The only series I ever liked that were done in Filmlook were The John Larraquette Show and Showtime’s Rude Awakening. Both are sitcoms in which the lead character is a recovering alcoholic; the Filmlook matched the sense of seeing everything through a permanent hangover.
Presumably, this was done to make the old episodes look more like the recent ones, and also to sell a whole new set of videos to pledge-drive callers. But I liked the old versions better.
Too bad I can’t go back in time to get tapes of the old versions. (Wait–with online auctions, I can.)
NEXT: What a conspiracy theorist might say about the great electricity crisis.
I HAVEN’T WORKED directly for Amazon.com, but I happened to be at Linda’s Tavern the evening of the big Amazon layoff. Despite personal hoarseness due to a cold and/or flu bug (I’m much better now; thanks for asking), I succeeded at joining in with a rousing call from one of the back tables (obviously occupied by disgruntled laid-off workers) for everyone in the room to yell “Fuck Amazon!”
I could easily commiserate with the Amazon refugees. That very day, you see, I’d received email notice that the dot-com for which I’d been working for the past year would no longer need most of what I’d been doing for them.
Since March 2000, I’d been supplying daily online crossword puzzles to the L.A.-based Iwin.com. (Yes, I, Mr. California-Basher Supreme, willingly took cash from an L.A. media company.) Later in the year, I also started writing questions for Iwin’s trivia pages.
Iwin was bought out late last year by the N.Y.-based Uproar.com, another gaming site (and home to the official Family Feud and To Tell the Truth online games). The usual reorganization-based inconveniences followed (new invoicing procedures; additional delays in getting paid).
Then came word that the crosswords weren’t generating enough website traffic and would be jettisoned once their current backlog was exhausted.
As a freelancer, I didn’t have to work 60 hours a week in some dot-com office, chained to a cubicle save for “motivational” groupthink meetings. (Heck, I never even saw the office.) I was never expected to give my heart and soul to the company, or to have a company-logo tattoo on my ankle. I just did my work the best I could, and was (for once in my life) paid decently for it.
But as a freelancer, I also knew the gig could end at any time. Writers (at least those not employed at unionized newspapers) tend to have only slightly more job security than musicians.
And so, to borrow a motivational-book phrase, my cheese has been moved. I’m out in the maze now, searching for the next gig to keep me going while I keep trying to turn this self-publishing thang into a full-time operation.
Any suggestions?
NEXT: A single mom vs. the welfare bureaucracy.
JUST AS I START to get bored with my existing selection of cable channels, AT&T Digital Cable serves me up a fresh batch. In an effort to stave off the juggernaut of home-satellite-dish ownership, they’ve quickly gone and snagged up a bunch of the secondary and tertiary program services dish owners have long enjoyed.
Among them, in no particular order:
Still not on local cable screens but wanted, at least by me: The Food Network, ABC SoapNet, Boomerang (Cartoon Network’s oldies channel).
NEXT: If you’re really nice, I might share some pieces of my next book.
IN OTHER NEWS (Mike Barber in the P-I, on unseasonably-low levels in hydroelectric lakes): “A walk down through the terraced brown bluffs is a stroll through the history of modern beer. Colorful newer cans and bottles glimmer in the sun at the higher levels, giving way to more faded cans tossed overboard in the pre-Bud Lite era.”
YOU DON’T NEED those TV Land “Retromercials” to get a remembrance of the ’70s energy crisis nowadays.
But it’d still be fun to exhume some of the old public-service ads from the era. Like the one where Fred Flintstone sings and dances about “Conservation Energy,” or the one with images of a decrepit old ’20s gas station and a solemn announcer proclaiming that “gas for less is gone–less gas is here to stay.”
Between the government-sanctioned extortion games of Calif. electric-generating companies (spun off from electric “retail” providers by a “deregulation” scheme designed to turn the power biz into a high-yield game for stock-market speculators), OPEC oil-supply manipulations, domestic oil-and-gas biz consolidations (such as the Exxon-Mobil merger and BP’s gobbling-up of Amoco and Arco), and climate changes that’ve (perhaps permanently) limited the capacity of Northwest hydro plants, we’re essentially in a mess folks.
And it gets worse when you ponder that this might not be a confluence of bad tidings, but the end of a confluence of good tidings.
That is, the cheap oil and abundant electricity North Americans enjoyed in the ’90s may have been just temporary blessings, not permanent trends of which today’s hassles are momentary interruptions.
In other words: The bad good-old-days of the Energy Crisis are back. And this time, they may stay a while longer.
Get out the CB radios to search for gasoline (OK, you’ll probably use cell phones with wireless e-mail instead, but the idea’s the same). Bring back the toilet bricks, the three extra layers of fiberglass attic insulation, the vanpools, and the notices in the windows of movie theaters and shopping centers apologizing for keeping their electric signs on.
Also, it won’t just be in the back pages of obscure magazines but in junk e-mails that you’ll find solicitations about “miracle” fuel-cell inventions (just needing that little extra bit of capital investment from you to become practical), or conspiracy stories about that secret gasoline pill the oil companies are supposed to have kept off the market.
Hey, maybe we’ll even get a revival of wind and solar power; so something good could come of this yet.
And if we’re really, REALLY lucky, perhaps those monster luxury SUVs will sooner or later become quaintly nostalgic but obsolete relics.
NEXT: Still more wacky new cable channels.
I’VE LONG BELIEVED more modern-day American citizens would be fans of jazz music if they weren’t so aggressively ordered, from childhood on, that they MUST love it.
You know, that music-appreciation-class bluster about “American Classical Music” or “This Country’s Only Indigenous Art Form.”
That, alas, is the overriding spirit of Ken Burns’s PBS maxi-documentary Jazz, lumbering to its dubious close next Monday. (The last episode being the only one to cover anything done within many of our readers’ lifetimes.)
The whole 18-hour thing is sluggishly laden with the worst didactic balderdash in the stoic narration and the even stoic-er read quotations from old critics (drowning out every single instrumental band and solo segment and even many vocal clips).
Then there’s the structure, the storyline Burns built the show around. It’s all about Great Men (and a few Great Women), American heroes who overcame (for the black musicians) a racist society or (for the white musicians) conformist notions of social respectability. The swirling stew of influences and trends, of commercial thrusts and avant-garde parries, gets muted and confined by the restrictions of a narrative amenable to suburban middle-class parents (i.e., boring as hell to suburban middle-class kids).
One critic even compared Burns, in his pedestrian approach to the topic and his sports-hero depiction of jazz’s greats, to “Bob Costas with an NEA grant.”
But, this being an age when audiovisual entertainments can be as mutable and expansionist as the best jazz has always been, we don’t necessarily need to be stuck with Burns’s work in its current form. We can write in to PBS and demand a deluxe DVD version of the series.
The new on-camera interviews in Jazz are fun, so they could stay in this proposed special edition–as stand-alone clips accessible from the DVD Extras menu.
Similarly, the narrations and quotations should be shunted off to an optional audio track.
That leaves the heart of jazz, and of Jazz–the music itself.
This proposed special edition would contain all the tuneage of the series, with each song played to its full length. (That would require more of the beautiful old-movie footage and historic still photos (did anyone else notice the three-second shot of a Louis Armstrong marquee sign outside Seattle’s Showbox?), but Burns probably has those piled up to his reed hole.)
This version wouldn’t preach at people, especially kids and teens, about how important jazz is.
It would simply let them hear and see for themselves how great it is.
A Final Thought: Jazz, like all the really great American music and culture, had and has just about nothing to do with that stoic-middlebrow PBS-ian (or Ken Burns-ian) voice of mellow authority. Real jazz (like ragtime, western swing, swamp blues, Gospel, rockabilly, R&B, bluegrass, disco, Ramones-era punk, Melle Mel-era hiphop, etc. etc. etc.) is music of cultural mongrelization and cross-pollenization; of life and lust and passion; of pain and loss and joy and the will to go on.
That’s why the music will survive long after dumb TV shows about it have been deservedly forgotten.
NEXT: Should we pity poor Belltown yet?
FOR NEARLY A CENTURY NOW (actually longer if you consider the touring vaudeville circuits), the entertainment industry has been at the forefront of the drive to turn this mongrel assortment of conquered natives, ex-slaves, and immigrants from all over into One America.
A people of one language (American English), one cuisine (bland), one apparel style (the toned-down Sears knockoffs of the previous year’s couture), one politick (the narrow oscillation between “liberal” big-money stooges and “conservative” big-money stooges), and most especially one culture.
A culture defined by Top 40 music, Top 10 radio (and later television) shows, Republican newspapers, best-seller books, marketable celebrities, and especially by the movies.
As the other major media began to splinter into niches and sub-niches (secondary and tertiary cable channels, hate-talk and shock-talk radio, alterna-weeklies and local business papers, and this whole Web thang), the movie industry has held steadfast in its drive to mold and hold a single unified audience.
Every woman’s supposed to weep for Julia Roberts’s love life. Every man’s supposed to cheer at Schwarzenegger’s gunslining. Every child’s supposed to gaze in wonder at the Lion King’s antics. Not just across this continent but globally.
(The few established niche genres within the movie world (“indie” hip-violence fests, foreign “art” films, direct-to-video horror and porn) are exceptions that prove the rule.)
So it’s a small surprise to read from a card-carrying Hollywood-insider hype artist, longtime Variety editor Peter Bart, acknowledge recently that there’s no single American mass populace anymore.
The cause of Bart’s revelation? Not the changes within the non-movie entertainment milieu, but the Presidential election fiasco. The two big parties had so effectively thrusted and parried their target-marketing efforts that, by the time the statistical-dead-heat results came in, they’d forged equally-sized constituencies, each with strengths in different demographic sectors.
Bart fails to realize these political coalitions are at least partly group marriages of convenience. Many Bush voters aren’t really censor-loving, art-hating hix from the stix; just as many Gore voters aren’t really free-trade-loving, hiphop-hating corporate mandarins.
A better explanation of the U.S. political divide comes from the British Prospect magazine, by a writer who asserts that, even after all these years, the socio-cultural-political divide in America remains north-vs.-south. In his view the Democrats, once the party of Southern racists and Northern Irish Catholics, are now the party of “good government” New Englanders and sanctimonious whitebread Northwesterners. The Republicans, once the party of Wall Street princes and Illinois farmers, are now the party of good-old-boy Texas oil hustlers and sex-loathing South Carolina reactionaries.
(The essay’s writer says he doesn’t know how to classify the West, but I do: Us Nor’westers are Northerners first and Westerners second; while Calif. is run by a Southern doublefaced aesthetic of public moralism and private crony-corruption.)
But even these classifications are overly broad. They always have been, but are even more oversimplistic nowadays.
The American scene isn’t breaking down into two cultures, but dozens, even hundreds. The politicians know this, and are scrambling to keep their coalitions together. The movie business, apparently, doesn’t know this. Yet.
TOMORROW: Micosoft? Discriminatory? How can one think such a thing?
TODAY AND TOMORROW, some recent departures from the pop-cult scene, locally and nationally.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #1: The 211 Club pool hall abandoned its increasingly costly Belltown space after 16 years (following more than 40 years at its previous site where Benaroya Hall is now). It was something Belltown, and Seattle in general, is rapidly losing–a classy and unpretentious gathering place, a timeless and fadless site for serious playing without noise or capital-A Attitude.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #2: Montgomery Ward is closing its last 299 stores after 106 or so years in business. Most news articles about the closure claimed Wards had lost its market niche to newer chains like Wal-Mart and Target. But the roots of Wards’ decline go back many decades earlier, to its rule by a bullhorn company president named Sewell Avery.
In his prime, Avery brought color photography and modern graphic design to the Wards catalogs; and spearheaded the company’s expansion into retail stores.
But he became both dictatorial and senile. There’s a famous photo of him being forcibly carried out of his office in 1944 by Federal agents, because he’d refused to obey War Production Board quotas regarding the use of scarce materials for consumer goods.
In the postwar years Avery got even odder–he kept the retail stores at a uniform size and building style (two stories plus a basement and half-story mezzanine), small and unresponsive to local market conditions. Then he decided the catalog was too risque, and ordered that all women’s fashions except coats were to be photographed on dress forms, not live models or even mannequins.
By the time Wards’ board of directors finally had enough votes to oust Avery, the chain had become a distant competitor to Sears and Penney’s, and never caught up. It junked its “big book” catalog a decade before Sears did, and retreated from a national retail presence to a few select regions where it could afford to compete.
Even in some of those, such as Portland, it found itself shut out of major mall projects and had to build freestanding stores far from the peak car-traffic zones. Such companies as Mobil Oil and GE invested millions to keep Wards alive, but to no ultimate avail.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #3: Oldsmobile was America’s oldest car brand, but the General Motors top brass, in their infinite ignorance, didn’t know what to do with it. It had long ago become the odd leftover in GM’s grand market-segmentation strategies; it offered few models that weren’t renamed versions of other GM products.
Olds’s final end wasn’t a casualty of imports or SUVs, but an admission that GM couldn’t think of anything to do with it anymore.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #4: When KOMO-TV put up its grandiose new building, I was unaware the station was going to promptly demolish its old building. It was a beautiful work of postwar, post-Deco architecture.
At a garage sale once, I managed to obtain the big color brochure commemorating the building’s opening in ’46. That was still in the so-called Golden Age of Radio; but KOMO was already planning to expand into TV, and built its new broadcasting palace with that in mind. But the Truman Administration froze new TV licenses soon after KING-TV got on the air.
KOMO-TV had to wait until ’54 to start up. It got the local NBC affiliation, and within two years had the region’s first color cameras (one of which is now on display in the Lincoln-Mercury showroom up on Aurora). But then KING snatched the NBC franchise in ’59, leaving KOMO with ABC (whose market position then was comparable to UPN’s today).
All that history, and four decades’ worth more, were in the old building at Fourth and Denny. Boomerang, the local kiddie show hosted by former Hollywood voice-over singer Marni Nixon. Assorted Town Meetings and AM NWs and Northwest Afternoons. Keith Jackson’s first sportscasts. That still-harrowing film footage from a news photographer who got caught in the Mt. St. Helens ash storm.
All that’s left of the building are the memories, whatever tapes the station’s kept, and a small pile of rubble (which, admittedly, gave folks standing on Denny a better view of the Space Needle fireworks on 1/1).
TOMORROW: A few more sad tales of this type.
THE TRADITION CONTINUES: For the 15th consecutive year, here’s your fantastical MISCmedia In/Out List. Thanks to all who contributed suggestions.
As always, this list predicts what will become hot or not-so-hot over the course of the Year of HAL 9000; not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you think every person, place, thing, or trend that’s big now will just keep getting bigger forever, I’ve got some dot-com stocks to sell you.
(P.S.: Most every damned item on this list has a handy weblink. Spend the weekend clicking and having fun.)
INSVILLE
OUTSKI
White kids who wish they were doo-wop singers
White kids who wish they were pimps
Seattle Union Record
Seattle Scab Times
Canadian Football League
Xtreme Football League
The print version of Nerve
Hardcore pay-per-view
Classic Arts Showcase
TNN
Christian sex clubs
Abstinance preaching
The American Prospect
The Weekly Standard
Retro burlesque
Thong Thursday
Razor scooters (still)
General Motors
Independent publishing
eBooks
Jon Stewart (now more than ever)
Chris Matthews
Dot-orgs
Dot-coms
Kamikazes
Martinis
Grant Cogswell
Tim Eyman
Whoopass
Powerade
Tantra
Bloussant
2-Minute Drill
Survivor
Verso
Regnery
Political gridlock
“Bipartisanship”
Scarlet Letters
Cosmo Girl
Renewing Tacoma
Saving San Francisco
Caffe Ladro
Folger’s Latte
TiVo
UltimateTV
McSweeney’s (still)
Tin House
Napster (while it lasts)
Liquid Music
Austin, home of political chicanery
Austin, home of hip music
Lookout Records
Interscope (still)
Public displays of affection
Personal digital assistants
Jared Leto
Chris O’Donnell
Building an all-around team
Depending on one superstar
Helen Hunt
Gwyneth Paltrow
Kenneth Lonergan
Robert Zemeckis
Open-source software
Microsoft.NET
“Slow food”
Fast Company
Goth revival #7
Ska revival #13
Antenna Internet Radio
The Funky Monkey 104.9
Bed Bath and Beyond
Lowe’s Home Centers
Green Republicans
Corporate Democrats
Gents
Dudes
Vamps
Bimbos
Collecting early home computers
Collecting Pokemon cards
Concerts in houses
House music
Cafe Venus and Mars Bar
Flying Fish
Fat pride
No-carb diets
Dump-Schell movement
Kill-transit movement
Hard cider
Hard lemonade
Indie gay films
Showtime’s Queer As Folk
Boondocks
Zits
Internet telephony (at last)
Wireless Internet
Coronation Street (UK soap on CBC)
Dawson’s Creek
Energy conservation
Energy deregulation
Microsoft breakup
AOL/Time Warner merger
Dark blue
Beige
Pho
Chalupas
Caleb Carr
Stephen King
’90s nostalgia
’80s nostalgia
Toyota Echo
Range Rover
Sweat equity
Venture capital
Reality
“Reality TV”
Rubies
Crystals
Blackjack
NASDAQ
Matt Bruno
Ricky Martin
Quinzo’s
Subway
Hamburg
Mazatlan
Georgetown
Belltown
Red wine
Ritalin
Rational thinking
“War on Drugs”
Economic democracy
Corporate restructuring
Culottes
Teddies
Following your own path
Believing dumb lists
NO COLUMN MONDAY, BUT ON TUESDAY: What you might see on this site in the year of Also Sprach Zarathustra.
