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