THE POKEMON FAD might be fading fast, but it’s still a useful metaphor for much of human society. The Japanese-invented cartoon universe of 151 cute “Pocket Monsters” is, like many anime creations, much more complex and layered than U.S.-devised kiddie fare.

Thus, its characters can even be used to symbolize the U.S. Presidential election.

Herewith, our first-ever “Poke-President” guide:

AL GORE: The perfect Poke-world stand-in for Droning Al is Jigglypuff– the wide-eyed Pokemon who defeats its opponents by singing a lovely song that puts them all to sleep. Jigglypuff thinks its song is merely beautiful; when all other Pokes and humans go snoozin’ as a result, it takes out a felt-tip pen and draws scornful patterns on their faces. Sort of like a policy wonk chiding us for not fully appreciating his 151-point economic platforms.

GEORGE W. BUSH: Most perfectly represented by the cross-eyed Psyduck. This Poke-critter attempts to disable its fighting foes by sending out a psychic “confusion attack,” only to usually end up making itself too confused to even know which way it’s going. It’s even capable of staring itself down in a reflecting pond to the point of paralysis. Still, it’s cuddly and sympathetic in its usually pathetic attempts to hold its own in the arena of combat.

PAT BUCHANAN: There are several bad-guy Poke-critters who could symbolize our aging borderline-bigot, but the most appropriate is Koffing. This Pokemon floats through the air to launch a lethal “smokescreen attack”–subjecting the other Pokemon (and its own trainers) with an unbreathable cloud of thick black smoke. Thus, it’s a perfect match for Pat, who (heart symbols) big polluters and is always blowing a lot of hot air.

RALPH NADER: Fighting Ralph’s most apropos Poke-counterpart is the fire-breathing Charizard. One of the most powerful good-guy Pokemon, Charizard’s a never-say die competitor–when there’s a truly important cause at stake. But it can’t be bothered to take part in the commercialized nonsense of organized Pokemon cockfighting (the Poke-world’s counterpart to organized sports, and hence a great metaphor for the meaningless gamesmanship rites of organized politics). When asked to combat just for the sake of combatting, it will blow flames in the face of its would-be trainers and go back to sleep.

TOMORROW: On the Sound Transit commuter train.

ELSEWHERE:

• Still-classic graphic wonders, the posters from the Works Progress Administration….
• What Karl Marx sez about globalization (found by Arts and Letters Daily)…./UL>
  

LAST FRIDAY AND ALL THIS WEEK, I’ve been reminiscing about Seattle during the fall of 1975.

I’d arrived in town in September of that year after a childhood spent in Olympia and Marysville, WA and Corvallis, OR. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, except cease living with my parents and stay the heck out of the military.

Within two days I’d found what would now be called a “mother-in-law” apartment in Wallingford (in a home run by a devout Catholic couple with a Mary shrine in the front yard; within a year, they got a brand-new Betamax VCR equipped with “Swedish Erotica” tapes.) Days later, I got a graveyard-shift job at the U District Herfy’s (a once locally-prominent burger chain; that particular branch is now a Burger King).

I hadn’t many career expectations at the time. Writing was something I seemed to be good at, but I also could see myself in acting, local TV, music, retail, graphic design, even bike-messengering (which I wound up doing for a while).

Some of my initial memories:

• Metro Transit. I’d grown up with school buses, but hadn’t lived in a jurisdiction with municipal bus service. How convenient! You just stand in one spot for as long as half an hour and you’ll get anywhere you want to go (except some really obscure places or places out in the ‘burbs).

• My first neighborhood. I’d known Wallingford only as a hillside by the freeway. I soon discovered a perfect little neighborhood with an independent supermarket (the Fabulous Food Giant), two indie drug stores, an indie hardware store (Tweedy & Popp, still there), an art-house movie theater, the original Dick’s Drive-In, and block after block of handsome old bungalows. At the time, it was still a working-stiffs’ area. Before long, it would be taken over by professors and lawyers; by now even they can’t afford it.
• Pioneer Square. Corny as it now seems, I remember eating a cinnamon roll on a late-summer afternoon outside the old Grand Central Bakery on Occidental Park and thinking this was the perfect time and place to be at.
• Daytime TV. Game shows and entertainment-talk shows I knew; but this new night job left me sedate enough at midmorning to finally begin to appreciate the slow-grinding emotionality of the soaps.
• Late-night TV. Johnny Carson had been around almost as long as the Space Needle. I’d seen his show very rarely as a teen. Now I got to see it any night I wasn’t working. Either I’d just gotten old enough to realize he wasn’t that tremendously funny, or his move from NY to LA had killed his creative spark. Today, I’m more apt to believe the latter.

  That fall, a weekly Carson rerun would be replaced by a new show, initially titled NBC’s Saturday Night. The contrast only made Carson’s shtick seem even dumber (but in an endearing sorta way).

• The movies. Marysville’s only theater at the time was a drive-in (which for a while showed “hard R” films in full view from I-5). Corvallis had a few indoor cinemas, showing mostly mainstream Hollywood product. But in Seattle I got to see the whole cinematic gamut; especially with that newly-minted Seattle International Film Festival, and with Randy Finley’s almost-as-new chain of art houses (the first of which is now the Grand Illusion).
• Hippies and ex-hippies. Until I started meeting a number of them in person, I had no idea how docile and mumbly-voiced they could be, or how much of a superior species they thought they were, just because they’d been to a couple of protest marches five years before.

  (My teenage encounters with the fundamentalist-Christian universe had already taught me to beware those who claimed they were the only ones going to Heaven on the basis of picayune doctrinal trivia.)

• Minorities. I’d known native Americans and a few Asian Americans, but African Americans were a new in-person experience. They mostly turned out to be almost nothing like the media images of them at the time, even the “positive” media images.
• Chronic depression. Despite having lived a squeaky-clean life to that point, I was still barely awake toward the 4 a.m. end of my work shifts at the burger joint, and was fired quite promptly. To be cast out from supposedly one of the world’s easiest jobs sent me into what I now realize was a blue funk of prescribable-for proportions.

All in all, it was a time of diminished expectations, of a big city that still, mistakenly, thought it was a helpless little cowtown.

Despite everything that’s happenned for the better around here since then, and there’s been a lot, I miss something of that funky humility.

MONDAY: Back to the future with the simplest, stupidest business motivation book ever written.

ELSEWHERE:

• Dennis Miller’s Monday Night Football jokes and references explained for you in microscopic detail! (found by Dandot)….
• “How to Win an Argument with a Vegetarian”

LAST FRIDAY, I began a recollection of what Seattle was like in the fall of 1975, when I first came to the allegedly Big City after a childhood in much smaller burgs.

I’d already mentioned the only “alternative” paper at the time, The Seattle Sun; and its target audience niche, a Capitol Hill-centered clique of 25-to-35-ers who just wanted to settle down after doing whatever they’d done in The Sixties.

The mainstream media in town were also fairly tame at the time.

The Seattle Times, still an afternoon paper, was still as wide as the Wall Street Journal and as plain-looking as a cheap suburban tract house. It always ran a half-page photo on Page 3, which was almost always of a dog or Mount Rainier. Its features section, then called “View,” had many cute stories about somebody doing something important who was–gasp–a woman!

The P-I, meanwhile, was a feisty archrival to the Times in those pre-Joint-Operating-Agreement days (well, except for the editorials, which usually touted the same Chamber of Commerce party line). It still had some of that old Hearstian spunk in it; at least in the sports pages, which were then mostly about the Sonics, college sports, and out-of-town stuff. There were no Mariners or Seahawks yet; though the P-I’s lovable geezer Royal Brougham (who’d been at the paper since WWI) was already drumming up oldtime rah-rah support for our soon-to-be local heroes.

Local TV was a far different animal then than now. Newscasts were heavy on in-studio commentators and grainy 16mm film. Portable video cameras were just being introduced, and were largely used as gimmicks (as they mostly still are). That meant a lot of interviews, press conferences, and staged media events (held before 1 p.m. so the film could be edited by 5); interspersed with a few of the fires and police chases that now dominate local newscasts across the country.

And there was still a good deal of non-news local TV. J.P. Patches and Gertrude still ran a bizarre, funky kiddie show on KIRO, whose influence on the local theatrical and performance scenes lasted for decades. KING had morning and evening talk shows, providing endless interview slots to all the itinerant book-pluggers crisscrossing the nation. KOMO had a “religious program” called Strength for These Days, which ran at 5:45 a.m. weekdays and consisted entirely of the same film footage of ocean waves and windblown trees every day, accompanied by choir music.

Seattle radio was an even odder beast. For one thing, AM stations still dominated.

For the grownups, KVI’s dynamic eccentrics Bob Hardwick and Jack Morton engaged a spirited ratings battle against KOMO’s personable square Larry Nelson and KIRO’s fledgling news-talk format.

For the kids, KVI and KING-AM played an odd top-40 melange of anything that happened to be popular (Dolly Parton, Lynard Skynard, Helen Reddy, Barry White, Edgar Winter, Tony Orlando, Donny Osmond).

For the older kids, the FM band found KISW and KZOK blasting Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and their metal brethern out to Camaro-drivin’ teens from Spanaway to Stanwood.

The UW, meanwhile, had a little FM operation, KUOW, which played blocks of classical music (competing with the then-commercial KING-FM) and that newfangled network newscast with those really soft-talking announcers. (The U also ran a smaller operation, KCMU, as a laboratory for broadcast-communications students to play Grateful Dead songs and mumble their way through the weather report.)

And there was an honest-to-goodness radical community station, KRAB-FM. Its announcers often hemmed and hawed their way through a set list, but they played everything from Thai pop to big-band to political folk. It had talk blocks, too: Vietnamese children’s fables, classical lit, rambling speeches by already-aging hippie celebrities about why Those Kids Today had become too apathetic. KRAB stumbled through internal politics and mismanagement until 1984. Its frequency is now occupied by KNDD.)

TOMORROW: The Seattle arts scene at the time.

IN OTHER NEWS: Here’s a fun rumor for all you conspiracy theorists (which I’m not): Could OPEC countries be scheming to raise oil prices and engender U.S. voter restlessness against Gore/Lieberman? (found by Progressive Review)

ELSEWHERE:

• Got one of those new telephone prefixes that never had a name to go with it? Add your own, from this official 1955 Bell System list of “Officially Recommended Exchange Names” (found by Clarke Stone)….

NOW THAT EITHER a summer or winter Olympic Games occur every other year, the whole mega-ritual has become almost too familiar to seem really special; especially as packaged for American network TV.

The drill can be as painful as mile 24 of a marathon, and lasts much longer. Network officials invariably overpay for the rights to the games, then decide American viewers aren’t really interested in the sporting competitions.

So they end up televising only brief snippets of the various contests–just enough to set the stage for the supposed real audience grabbers, the slickly-edited personality profiles and human-interest vignettes.

During these segments, the athletes try their hardest to project enough personality to become instant celebrities (and, with luck, score big endorsement deals). But their constant training since learning to walk has turned most of them into no-fun workaholics, scarcely able to complete a coherent sentence.

And even when events are playing (taped hours before and edited in such a way as to destroy a game’s natural pacing), the announcers do everything possible to create a “feel-good” narrative storyline that’ll appeal to 18-35 female viewers who don’t normally watch sports.

That means U.S. competitors are often billed as the “stars,” whether in real contention or not.

It means events that are supposed to appeal to the target audience (gymnastics, swimming, women’s track and field) get priority time and attention, while others are left in obscurity.

It also means the technical, less-flashy elements of a sport are ignored whenever possible, in favor of highlight-reel spectacle moments.

Compare and contrast, meanwhile, to the CBC coverage, which has drawn cult followings in U.S. border towns such as Seattle and among big-dish satellite subscribers.

CBC does play a lot of attention to its country’s competitors; but since there are far fewer of them, it means the channel shows long stretches of field hockey, water polo, and many other NBC-unfavorite sports that happen to have a strong Canadian entrant.

CBC’s lower-budgeted coverage relies more heavily on the international-feed video, which emphasizes straightforward, no-nonsense coverage. To this footage, the Canadian network adds announcers who not only know the sports they’re covering, they assume their viewers care about the sports too.

And because it encourages its viewers to care about the games themselves, rather than just the instant celebrities, CBC isn’t afraid to show them live. This year, that means afternoon events in Sydney air in prime time in Toronto (late afternoon out here). Evening events in Sydney air late-night in Pacific Time, in the wee hours in the east.

NBC could’ve done this with its pair of subsidiary cable channels, but apparently couldn’t get over the “this is the way we’ve always done it” syndrome. The result: Anemic ratings and widespread disinterest; while the CBC broadcasters are becoming the games’ real heroes to those Americans capable of receiving them.

We’re probably seeing the end of the Olympic Games, as American television viewers have known them. The mass audience NBC wants can’t be corralled in by human-interest pap anymore because it doesn’t exist anymore. The next games could be covered on a broadcast channel with highlight shows (that don’t pretend to be more than highlight shows), on cable with live coverage of events with an adequate audience draw, and on the Net with unedited, multiple streaming-video feeds of everything. (Yes, even the Modern Pentathlon.)

In the post-mass-market age, nobody cares about media products packaged for people who don’t care. In sports coverage, you’ve gotta find, nurture, and build niche audiences among people who know and care about the particular sports being covered.

In the case of the Olympics, if you aggregate enough niche audiences for all the component sports, you could still have something.

TOMORROW: Web content as shareware.

ELSEWHERE:

• Despite all the Marion Jones cover stories, media coverage of women’s sports still has a ways to go….
• Hollywood’s last defender of free speech: Mr. Showgirls!…
• Make up your own X-treme sport! (found by Memepool)….

LIKE THE PRE-DOT-COM SEATTLE, Canada has long been a place whose most prominent cultural identity has centered on its collective moping about whether it has a cultural identity.

And like the old Seattle stereotype, the subsidiary tenets of the Canadian stereotype are of a generic North American region with a smidgen more politeness than most, and an economy centered around the hewing of wood and the gathering of water.

Seattleites cry and wail whenever a beloved little sliver of what used to pass for “unique,” or at least locally-thought-up, culture goes away (a condo-ized old apartment building, a low-rise downtown block).

Canadians had been so apparently starved for a show of national pride that when one came along a year and a half ago or so, citizens rallied around it and even took to memorizing its lines. This unifying object of nationalistic fervor? A beer commercial.

When I visited Vancouver again last week, I set out in specific search of the Canadian (or at least a Vancouver) spirit. Something defining “Our Neighbors to the North” as more than just other than U.S. folk.

I arrived in time to see the first all-Canadian episodes of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

In a Mother Jones essay years ago, Canadian author Margaret Atwood claimed her first experience of unfairness came while reading the ads on the insides of Popsicle wrappers, offering cool little toys and trinkets in exchange for a few hundred wrappers–but closing with the fine-print disclaimer, “Offer Not Available In Canada.”

Similarly, a lot of the appeal of Millionaire is that any adult with a wide knowledge of useless trivia can become a contestant. You don’t have to live in L.A. and go through two or more rounds of in-person auditions.

But you do have to be a U.S. citizen.

The CTV network has aired the U.S. edition of the British-born show, to handsome ratings, despite its viewers’ ineligibility to be contestants. The show’s done so well that the normally tight-spending CTV commissioned two hour-long episodes just for itself. It hired a Canadian host (one of its own talk-show stars), recruited Canadian contestants and audience members, and devised Canadian-content questions.

But then, to save some money, it had the specials produced in New York, using the set and crew of the ABC Millionaire.

(Yes, you heard it right: A Canadian TV show shot in the U.S.! Truly an anomaly of X-Files level weirdness.)

Anyhoo, the two episodes got more viewers than any domestically-produced entertainment show in Canadian TV history, even though no contestant won more than C$64,000 (about US$44,000; still the most ever won on a Canadian game show). CTV promised that later this season, Canada will become the umpteenth nation to air its own regular Millionaire series. A triumph of fairness for all the bespectacled, bad-hair-day-prone egghead guys from Missasagua to Kamloops, but not necessarily an ingredient in the country’s endless search for a Unique Cultural Identity.

Or maybe not. According to one critic, writing on the newsgroup alt.tv.game-shows:

“I have this ugly feeling that [CTV host Pamela Wallin] or perhaps the Canadians involved feel that she needs to do different things than Regis Philbin in order to make the show distinctively Canadian. This is one of the most common (and most exasperating) traits Canadians tend to have: we follow the lead of the USA, but add some so-called Canadian spin so that we can reassure ourselves that we’re not Americans. PW went mildly anti-Regis: no jokes, no fast pace, heck, no accent! If she’d just relax and stop trying so hard to be Canadian, it’d all work better.”

Maybe “trying so hard to be Canadian” really IS Canada’s unique cultural identity. Except that it’s darn close to Seattle’s cultural identity.

TOMORROW: Other Canadian-adventure notes.

IN OHER NEWS: If there’s a place where an “English-language-only” rule is especially inappropriate, it’d be among international long-distance operators.

ELSEWHERE:

• The role of human values in design….
• “The folks who move to Pioneer Square and bitch about the drunks are as bad as the yuppies who move to Carnation and complain about the smell of cow shit….”
• Send a banned book to censor-wannabe Joe Lieberman today!…

THE MAJOR-PARTY APOLOGISTS, especially the Democrats, are pleading with voters not to jump on any Nader bandwagon. They’re insisting there really is a difference between Gore and Bush, enough of a difference that you’ve gotta choose only one of those two–lest the nation be stuck with the other of those two.

Yet the Gore supporters’ claims of difference (which seem to involve such secondary issues as how quickly Social Security funds can be fed into the control of Wall Street speculators) continue to be contradicted by the increasingly-apparent similarities.

Both love “free” trade and the rule of global financiers. Both want to turn up the federal $ spigot to big weapons contractors. Both would keep up the dumb ol’ “war on drugs,” and pay as little lip service as possible to campaign-finance reform. Both claim today’s is the best of all possible economic worlds; even though real-world wage and earning-power equations get decreasingly rosy the further you stray from the top-20 income percentile.

And both camps have said, or at least implied, that Something Must Be Done against all the sexy, threatening, violent, or just plain icky material out there in our pop-culture landscape these days.

They’re not saying it loudly or direclty enough to threaten the media conglomerates the candidates depend upon for hype pieces (er, “news coverage”) and, in the case of Gore, for big campaign bucks.

But they are saying it. Particularly Al Gore’s pal, and Tipper Gore’s sometime aide in crusades against musical free speech, Veep candidate Joe Lieberman.

The Lieb’s basic stump speech invokes two main themes:

• His personal devotion to Orthodox Judaism, expressed in terms Old Testament-knowledgable Christians can identify with; and
• his stoic disgust at That Filth Out There invading our movie/TV screens, our computer monitors, our CD shelves, and our magazine racks.

Lieberman and Gore have avoided, as far as I can tell, bashing NEA-supported art shows or college English classes. The Bush campaign, eager to put the GOP’s legacy of past priggishness behind it, has also been relatively muted in this regard–thus far. But the prigs still have a degree of power in the GOP trenches, and I predict it won’t be long before Bush starts trying to appeal to them.

So should we worry about these comparatively mild, but bipartisan, rants?

Yes.

If these rants become enforced public policy in the next administration, you probably won’t see direct government attempts to fully ban anything (except strip clubs).

You’re more likely to see, both within the next administration and from private groups operating under the next administration’s endorsement, targeted actions against specific “offensive” entertainments:

• Public outcries against raunchy songs (which, if past outcries are any prediction, will come mostly against black artists and/or indie labels);
• Calls for more restrictive and more consistent movie ratings;
• Further restrictions against indie and foreign films that attempt to get released uncut or unrated;
• Mandatory “V-chips,” “family hour” restrictions, and pressures on advertisers against raunchy TV shows (especially raunchy TV shows airing on channels not owned by Viacom, Time Warner, or Rupert Murdoch); and
• Mandatory (or at least really heavily encouraged) Internet “content rating systems,” censorware filters on all school and library computers, and other measures to make sure you’re unable to read nothing online that has as much sex and violence as, say, the Old Testament.
• Zoning and other pressures against outlets offering XXX videos (which, coincidentally, entirely involves video stores other than Blockbuster) and parental-warning-stickered CDs (i.e., stores smaller than Wal-Mart).

As usual, you needn’t fret for the big campaign-contributing media giants that have made zillions on raunch in commercial entertainment.

As we’ve seen with the conglomerates’ Napster-bashing, freedom and open expression aren’t among their highest priorities.

And as we’ve seen with the Napster phenom, such attempts to prop up the plutocracy of Big Media these days end up getting ever more desperate and blatant. They might not succeed in the long run, but can do a lot of damage in the attempt.

TOMORROW: Further adventures with the Razor scooter.

IN OTHER NEWS: Some 200 gay activists and supporters massed on Capitol Hill this past Saturday evening and Sunday morning, to counter-demonstrate against a series of antigay “rallies” by seven (count ’em!) supporters of a virulently bigoted Kansas preacher. Except at the end of the Saturday protests (when one counter-protester tried to approach one of the bigots, only to get shoved onto a car hood by the cops who were keeping the two camps apart), I’ve never seen so many loud and colorfully-dressed people get so worked up about a handful of inauspicious whitebreads since the last Presidential nominating conventions.

ELSEWHERE:

• Today’s most vigilant defenders of artistic freedom and crusaders against censorship–TV wrestling fans!…
• From would-be Net censors to Presidential candidates, the New Sanctimony isn’t just a threat from the rabid Right anymore….

RECENTLY I GOT me that AT&T digital-cable thangy, of which I’ve already written about in general terms.

One of the most intriguing and bizarre channels on the system is BBC America.

I hadn’t been a PBS pledge-giving Anglophile for umpteen years, but the BBC America package is something else. Like few cable channels since the early MTV, it’s a whole. It’s got a 24/7 unified programming aesthetic at work, due to its careful selection of BBC-controlled programs and the clear look-and-feel of its promo spots.

A brief explanation: The British Broadcasting Corp., as part of its continuing, government-directed drive to reduce its dependence on “license fees” to TV-set owners (kind of like a mandatory HBO subscription for all UK viewers), established two ad-funded cable/satellite channels for exporting its programs. BBC World is an all-news channel, beamed to cable systems and hotel rooms from Paris to Sydney to Santiago. BBC America is a mostly entertainment channel, aimed squarely at U.S. and Canadian cable and home-satellite systems.

Its schedule is aimed strictly for this niche, and emphasizes the types of BBC programs previously familiar to U.S. audiences on PBS stations. Hence, it doesn’t replicate the schedules of the BBC’s two U.K. broadcast channels (which include plenty of bizarre kiddie shows, collegiate quiz shows, fine-arts documentaries, morning talkfests, U.K. domestic newscasts, one or two Hollywood hit series per night, and day-long weekend coverage of darts and snooker tournaments).

What you do get are:

• Contemporary dramas;
• Historical costume dramas;
• “Britcom” comedies (including the already famous Absolutely Fabulous, Blackadder, and Fawlty Towers) in two-hour blocks of three 30-minute episodes (plus ads);
• Several simulcasts per day of BBC World news half-hours (always followed by a newsmaker-interview show called Hard Talk);
• Some daytime homemaking and decorating shows (including the original U.K. episodes of Antiques Roadshow, whose U.S. remake version has become the most popular show on some PBS stations);
• New and old episodes of the primetime soap EastEnders;
• Episodes from the Tom Baker era of Doctor Who; and
• a few pop-music shows, including the great variety show Later With Jools Holland.

But’s the juxtaposition of all this hi-class programming fare with the cheap-tchotchke commercials that really puts BBC America over, at least to me. There’s nothing quite like the hushed dialogue and slick camera moves of a drama like Love Hurts (office politics and sexual intrigue at a charity agency) or Casualty (office politics and sexual intrigue in a hospital) being interrupted by the loud hawking of such “As Seen on TV” products as the Turbie Twist hair turban, the Craftmatic adjustable bed, and a wall clock with pictures of toy trains.

It sure beats those “underwriting announcements” for ExxonMobil.

TOMORROW: A pair of local zine reviews.

NEWS ITEM OF THE WEEK (P-I Bumbershoot preview by R.M. Campbell, 9/1): “Bumbershoot has a long history of supporting local dance groups. Most are local….”

LAST FRIDAY, we discussed the re-emergence of interest in early-’80s skate punks.

But that’s just part of a growing ’80s nostalgia fetishism.

Just about every place you look, the music, the clothes, the video games, and even the polarized politics of what some of us used to call “Reagan’s AmeriKKKa” are back.

With one difference.

A good number of us who were around the first time HATED the ’80s.

We couldn’t wait to get beyond all the doo-doo that was going down then, which we’re still not fully beyond.

Herewith, an itemized explanation of how ’80s nostalgia differs from the real time:

• Music (hardcore): They were often louts and crusters who trashed clubs and rental halls (making promotion of any indie-rock shows nearly impossible), fought one another, and/or debilitated themselves with drugs and booze. Now, those who lived through hardcore punk and survived it all will wistfully look back on it as a magic time, an Age of Miracles now passed away from the earth. They’re getting worse at it than hippies.
• Music (power pop and noise pop): Movies like The Wedding Singer and radio formats like KNDD’s “Resurrection Jukebox” imagine the whole country was joyfully bopping to the Jam and the Psychedelic Furs.

  Actually, at least around here, this stuff was almost totally blacked out from local radio and clubs. There were seldom more than two tiny bars where you could hear anything more innovative than white blues bands.

  This gave its fans a sense of shared martyrdom, then a sense of community, then a sense of DIY movement-building which got a little sidetracked during those 1992 gold-rush days (when everybody in town felt they had to insist loudly that they were Not Grunge Dammit.)

• Music (hiphop): OK, one aspect of the decade to be wistful about. The hiphop Real Thing, back when it championed black intelligence instead of white stupidity.
• Video Games: Another now-lost art form. In the days of Pac-Man and Crazy Climber, gaming was about pace and play-quality and fun; not hyper-realistic, first-person-viewpoint slaughtering.
• Comics: The opening of specialty comics stores, and the nonreturnable distribution system supplying them, spawned a lot of second-string superhero crap, naked babes in outer space, and Ninja Turtle knockoffs.

  But there was also a blossoming of innovative, artistic, and really weird stuff: Love and Rockets, Eightball, Tales of the Beanworld, Dirty Plotte, RAW, etc. etc. etc.

• Movies: The promising ’70s art-film boom crashed to a thud with the arrival of that “rugged individualist” icon of global mass merchandising, the Action Hero. But the likes of Remo Williams were just the tip of the agent-driven, formulaic iceberg, which culminated years later with a real (computer generated) iceberg.

  Still, there were some true classics, and several more entries that weren’t really all that great but struck a chord with audiences who still recall them as coming-O-age keystones.

• TV: The first break in the three-networks oligopoly, and the slow dawning of the twelve-cable-channel-owners oligopoly.

  Some of those early cable shows were real hoots of blooper-filled, low-budget cheese (Loves Me Loves Me Not, A New Day In Eden, New Wave Theater, Financial News Network). Few predicted these hokey attempts would ever pose a real threat to the status quo of Blossom and Knots Landing.

  (In the crevices and interstices of all this, meanwhile, came such deservedly-remembered novelties as Max Headroom, The New Twilight Zone, Remote Control,The Tracey Ullman Show, and David Letterman’s wild, pre-celeb-fawning era.)

TOMORROW: The last of this for now.

ELSEWHERE:

• Was socialism doomed in the U.S. from the start? Are “new community” concepts today doomed for the same reasons?…
• One site that redefines the term “woody”….

NOW LET US PRAISE the greatest Northwest pop-cult book ever written (other than Loser, of course.)

I speak of Wet and Wired: A Pop Culture Encyclopedia of the Pacific Northwest, by Randy Hodgins and Steve McLellan.

The two Olympians have previously written a history of Seattle-set movies, published a short-lived print and web zine called True Northwest, and produced a comedy radio show. This modestly-produced, large-size trade paperback is their masterwork.

Its 226 pages cover over 500 of the most famous and/or influential people, places, and things in the Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver metro areas (plus a few side trips to Tacoma and Spokane). Mixing and matching the region’s three big cities means even the best expert about any one town won’t already know everything in the book (though I, natch, was familiar with at least most of the topics).

In short, easily digestible tidbits of prose (curiously laid out at odd angles), you get–

• Artistic and literary figures (Lynda Barry, Jacob Lawrence, cartoonist John Callahan, essayist Stewart Holbrook, whodunit-ist J.A. Jance).
• Business and political leaders (the Nordstroms, software moguls, progressive populists, big-business Democrats, Wobblies, and John (Reds) Reed).
• Food and drink favorites (Rainier and Oly beers, the Galloping and Frugal Gourmets, Dick’s Drive-Ins, Fisher Scones).
• Media (J.P. Patches, Wunda Wunda, some of the CBC’s blandest Vancouver-based dramas, The X-Files, Northern Exposure, Keith Jackson, Ahmad Rashad).
• Music (The old Seattle jazz underground, the Wailers/Sonics garage bands, and a certain latter-day music explosion or three).
• Attractions, Places, and Events (the 24-Hour Church of Elvis, the Java Jive, the Kalakala, Ivan the gorilla, Ramtha).
• Sports and Recreation (all the big pro and college teams, a few long-gone outfits like our North American Soccer League teams, legendary (Rosalynn Sumners) and infamous (Tonya Harding) stars).

…and lots, lots more.

The book’s only sins, aside from a handful of misspelled names, are those of omission:

• You get Nordstrom and the late Frederick & Nelson, but not the Bon Marche.
• You get Ivar’s and Brown & Haley (“Makes ‘Em Daily”), but not the great roadside attraction that was Tiny’s Fruit Stand in Cashmere, WA.
• You get Vancouver music greats DOA and 54-40, but not Skinny Puppy or even k.d. lang. (Its Seattle music listings are equally uncomprehensive, but there are other places you can go to read about that.)
• Portland comic-book publisher Dark Horse gets a listing, but Seattle’s Fantagraphics Books (and the locally-based portion of its stable of artists) isn’t.

But these are relatively minor quibbles that can (and, I hope, will) be rectified in a second edition. What Wet and Wired does have is well-written, accurate (as far as I’m able to tell), and a great mosaic of glimpes into our rather peculiar section of the planet.

TOMORROW: Cirque du Soleil pitches its tent in Renton’s Lazy B country.

HEADLINE OF THE WEEK (Tacoma News Tribune, 8/21): “Giant Salmon a Scary Prospect.” I can see the horror movie ad campaigns now….

IN OTHER NEWS: Sometimes justice does occur!

ELSEWHERE:

• Can the nearly all-female-written-and-edited, yet still feminist-vilified, romance novel industry return to its formerly winning ways?…
• Analyzing the great comic-book implosion (found by Arts Journal)….

SOME SHORT STUFF TODAY, starting with a defense of a long-maligned political institution.

BRING ON THE SOUSA MARCHES: No, I don’t think major-party political conventions are a relic needing abolition. Those who so loudly proclaim the conventions’ obsolescence appear largely to be media people, frustrated that the Presidential nomination process is no longer a dragged-out drama leading to a climactic point of decision in a big arena with live TV cameras.

Yet these same critics use, as their main argument, the claim that the conventions have devolved into “a made-for-TV event.”

There have been many, many conventions, before and during the TV era (and will be in any post-TV era) in which the party’s ticket was known weeks in advance. The conventions all went on anyway. They gave the party faithful a, well, a party to reward their hard work and a big pep rally to inspire further efforts.

Today, conventions serve these purposes and a couple more.

They give the party, and by extension its candidate, an opportunity to prove its organizational skills. (George McGovern once told C-SPAN he knew his candidacy was doomed when he couldn’t get his acceptance speech started before 1 a.m. Eastern.)

And they provide a “long-form” forum for a candidate’s platform.

Yeah, call it an “informercial” if you like. But also call it a tool for unmediated communication with the populace.

The Presidential nomination process is broken, but it’s broken in its foresection–the primaries and the ultra-big-money fundraising. The conventions, largely, aren’t broken (though an equivalent mechanism for independent candidates still needs to be thought up).

GRAFFITO OF THE WEEK (in the Six Arms men’s room): “This town is a youth culture retirement home.”

THROWAWAY GAG OF THE WEEK: Was passing the Paramount Theater when a woman walking toward the theater’s touring production of Fosse told a friend she’d last been to the place “to see Lord of the Rings,–I mean Lord of the Dance.” Of course, I had to barge in; “It’s amazing how high Frodo can kick.”

DROPPING THE POKEBALL: Apparently, the Pokemon phenomenon has passed its peak, at least in North America. Apparently, kids turning 10 are, like kids turning 10 oft do, renouncing the recreational fads associated with those immature 9-year-olds. Merchandising products with the 151 superpowered cute cartoon animals and their human pals are stagnating. The second theatrical movie faced disappointing box-office results. Sales of Pokemon gaming cards have reportedly plummeted. (If the latter’s the case, then Wizards of the Coast, the local outfit that made the U.S. version of the gaming cards, sold out to Hasbro just in time.)

TOMORROW: Monorail madness and its meaning.

ELSEWHERE:

• When bad things happen to good webcam women (found by Robot Wisdom)….

AS PROMISED about a month ago, here’s my reiteration of my sordid past with current Republican gubernatorial candidate and sometime talk-radio hatemonger John Carlson.

It’s a tale that goes back two decades and a few months, to the start of his career.

I was editor of the UW Daily. Carlson was an up-and-coming political operative who, thanks to a little frathouse gladhanding, had become a student representative on the Board of Student Publications.

Two of Carlson’s buddies had submitted freelance pieces to the paper. One was a dull profile of country singer Larry Gatlin, written on one of those old script-typeface typewriters. The arts and entertainment editor, Craig Tomashoff (later with People magazine) asked the writer to resubmit it on a regular typewriter, with changes. The revised version was still in script-type and was only marginally better; Tomashoff declined to use it.

Carlson’s other pal submitted a “humor” piece for the opinion page about Ted Kennedy (then challenging incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination). I forget the specifics of the “jokes,” but I think one of them was that a President Ted would have no qualms about sending our boys into war, having already been a killer. I ran it, but with the more gruesome and potentially libelous remarks toned down.

I would soon learn that no matter how glibly Carlson boasted about his hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, he could instantly turn into a sniveling self-proclaimed victim when he didn’t get everything he wanted.

He put in a motion to the board to have me fired as editor, proclaiming me a one-man PC Thought Police out to spitefully stifle his noble friends’ courageous voices of dissent.

At the board meeting, only Carlson’s two freelancer pals spoke in favor of his motion, which was defeated (I either don’t remember the vote tally or never knew it).

It soon came out that this was all part of a larger scheme of Carlson’s. He was raising money from rich guys to start his own right-wing paper, The Washington Spectator. Its content was fashioned after similar unofficial right-wing papers at Dartmouth and a few other campuses; lotsa cheap insults, borderline-racist “jokes,” wholesale character-assassination attacks on just about everybody who wasn’t a conservative, all of it in the supposed name of protecting family values or Christian heritages or the free-market system.

Carlson went back to the Board of Student Publications when his Spectator was ready to roll. He wanted to use the Daily‘s on-campus dropoff spots for his paper on Daily non-publication days. The board turned him down. He threw another tantrum, calling on the moneyed and powerful men he was already sucking up to to try to force a deal through the UW bureaucracy.

Even without the coveted Daily drop boxes, Carlson’s Spectator got enough attention to help Carlson get funding for his own conservative think tank, which led to his newspaper columns, his radio bully pulit (emphasis on the “bully” part), his KIRO-TV commentary slots, his campaigns to kill affirmative action and public transportation in Washington state, and now his drive to become the state’s chief executive.

It should be said that Carlson’s own signed material in the Spectator wasn’t as insulting or as bigoted as some of the material in the other off-campus conservative papers during the Reagan era. Carlson probably was wary of anything that could haunt him in a future run for high office.

And I don’t believe he personally disliked me, or even really wanted me ousted as Daily editor.

He was simply perfectly willing, at the time, to step over anyone on his way to the top.

Some who’ve known him in more recent years tell me he’s become a civil, polite gent in private, even as he remains a smirking demagogue in public.

But if, through some unfortunate happenstance, he becomes governor of the state of Washington, we all could be in for a wild ride. The moment any legislator or separately-elected department head says anything different from his line, the second one piece of his legislative agenda gets voted down, will he turn on the crocodile tears to his zillionaire benefactors again? Will he whine about being the trampled-upon little victim, just because he wanted to give more powers and privileges to those who already have most of these?

TOMORROW: Can Stephen King jump-start the e-book biz? Should he?

ELSEWHERE:

• The next great post-Napster hope?…

SO I FINALLY SAW Survivor.

I’d planned not to, or at least not to write about it, as part of my ever-so-contrarian policy of avoiding whatever’s the only topic on Entertainment Tonight or the Fox News Channel during any particular month. In the past, that’s meant little-to-no remarks here about O.J. Simpson, Monica Lewinsky, Elian Gonzales, flag burning, or the departure of Kathie Lee Gifford.

But this time, I took the bait (or rather, the edible grubworms).

What I found: A compelling-in-that-train-wreck-sorta-way show that, while nominally based on a European series, plays out more like a cross between The Real World (and is just as unreal as that show, from another Viacom-owned channel), Japan’s extreme-embarrassment game shows, and corporate-warrior ideology.

The latter is the show’s most disturbing ingredient. I suppose if the New Agers could routinely misinterpret various indigenous people’s rites and customs, so can the Glengarry Glen Ross/Gordon Gekko ilk. But the whole Survivor premise is so against what real survival is all about (either for indigenous peoples, for teens and adults play-acting in “survival camps,” or for soldiers and others who happen to find themselves stuck somewhere.

That prior CBS desert-island show, Gilligan’s Island, was closer to the essence of real survival, on an island or in North American society. It depicted people who had little in common except their unsuitedness for the task at hand, and who had to learn to get along and work together for their common goal of living through their situation.

The Survivor motto, “Outplay–Outwit–Outlast,” deliberately contradicts all of this. It’s all about the rugged individualism, backbiting, and looking-out-for-#1 championed by corporate idealogues dating back to Ford and Rockefeller’s “social Darwinism” theories. Philosophies that allowed those who’d schemed and stolen their way to the top to heartily justify everything they’d done.

But as I’ve been saying for some time, business isn’t everything. And as local author David C. Korten, whom I discussed yesterday, says, the established priorities and philosophies of business (particularly of big business) aren’t the same as those of life in general. Business’s priorities can even contradict or deny those needed for real living, real relating, and real (as opposed to merely fiscal) growth.

A society that tries to hard to be like Survivor will not, in the long run, survive.

TOMORROW: The nearly-annual ‘Why I Still Love Seafair’ column.

ELSEWHERE:

• The author of those really simple computer guidebooks from the ’80s died a tragic, possibly preventable, death….
• A hundred years of great American convenience foods! (found by Larkfarm)….

THOSE OF YOU who’ve already been living in the now two-thirds or so of King County that has AT&T Digital Cable already know about what I’m discussing today.

For most of the ’90s, Summit Cable (the feisty independent serving the few leftover Seattle neighborhoods other cable companies didn’t bother with) had a far better channel lineup than either Viacom or the cable operation successively run by TelePrompTer, Group W, and TCI. When Viacom Cable upgraded its local system (just prior to being bought up by TCI, leaving that company with two different sets of channels in different parts of Seattle), Summit remained either a step ahead of or a step behind in selection.

But TCI got bought out by AT&T, which is aggressively pursuing digital upgrades as a means toward eventually offering all sorts of services (including, down the line, a return of its old “Ma Bell” local phone service).

Summit, meanwhile, was bought out by Millennium Digital Media, a multi-regional independent with seemingly few immediate priorities beyond cash-milking its properties.

Thus, while Millennium’s digital-upgrade package includes only lots of pay-per-view movies, AT&T offers channels with real, short-form TV programming. (What the TV set was built for.)

In all, 35 channels are on the digital service, combined with the 73 channels on the system’s “expanded basic” package.

TCI’s ex-boss John Malone once claimed his company would eventually deliver as many as 500 channels to any home that wanted them. Besides the 108 channels mentioned here already, AT&T Digital has 73 premium and pay-per-view channels, plus 37 music audio channels.

No, that’s still not “enough,” programming-choice-wise.

For one thing, the lineup’s weighted with multiple versions of channels AT&T partly owns (Discovery, TLC, BET, Fox Sports Net, QVC, Encore/Starz), as well as channels AT&T and/or its predecessors at TCI contracted to put on all its cable systems regardless of local interest (Oxygen, Fox News Channel, etc.).

It’s still missing several channels popular among satellite-dish owners and on cable systems in other locales (WGN, the Travel Channel, the Food Network, ABC SoapNet, Playboy TV, the computer-news channel ZDTV, the MTV alternative MuchMusic, the British/Canadian entertainment channel Trio, etc.).

And all those pay-per-view channels essentially show the same few movies, with scattered starting times. The concept of a video store inside your cable box is still too similar to the video racks some 7-Eleven stores used to have–just the same few mainstream Hollywood snoozers “everybody” but you supposedly loved.

And the official “Alternative” channel in the system’s audio section leaves even more to be desired. It plays almost nothing but those annoying “aggro” snothead bands and Pearl Jam impersonators.

On the plus side, there’s tons of fun stuff on AT&T Digital I just couldn’t get on Millennium:

• Game Show Network (all the heroes of my youth–Allen Ludden, Bill Cullen, Gene Rayburn).
• ESPN Classic (old games from when basketball was still a team sport).
• BET On Jazz (classic Nat “King” Cole episodes; odd footage of post-bebop pros playing in Japan).
• The Sundance Channel (cool foreign and indie movies uncut).
• Fox Movie Channel (I’ve a soft spot for creaky old ’40s crime films and ’50s CinemaScope travelogue dramas).
• BBC America (world news as if the non-U.S. world mattered; “Britcom” comedies not safely quaint enough for PBS; music and variety shows made by folks who know how to shoot such things dramatically).
• Ovation (remember when A&E was “The Arts and Entertainment Network”? When Bravo was “The Film and Arts Channel”? This is the newest self-proclaimed fine-arts cable channel, and for now it’s keeping to its promises).
• TV Land (somebody besides me actually remembers Finder of Lost Loves!).
• Encore True Stories (by day, fun/cheesy “Inspired By Actual Events” TV movies from the ’80s and early ’90s; by night, uncut theatrical melodramas like Scandal and The Lover).

All in all, a big step forward for TV lovers such as myself. But there’s still room for improvement, for even more diversity.

But I’m already in love with the way channels on digital cable appear in small image blocks, taking two seconds or more to fill the screen. Even though, one day soon, music-video and commercials directors are surely going to catch onto the schtick and imitate it to death.

TOMORROW: Is business the root of all evil?

ELSEWHERE:

• That marriage of Hanna-Barbera formula cartoonery and ’60s hot-rod iconography: Wacky Races!…