LISTEN UP: Your fave online columnist might be appearing on a local talk-radio outlet soon. Maybe even this Friday. Further details forthcoming.

NOT TOO LONG AGO, I used to gloat to my friends in the rest of Seattle.

I was luckier than they were, because I lived in Summit Cable territory. That meant I got almost 20 cool channels that the losers out in TCI neighborhoods couldn’t.

The tables have since turned. TCI was bought by AT&T, which promptly worked to finish up the fiber-optic cable installations TCI had lagged on for years. Summit, which already had fiber in its downtown and south-end service areas, was bought by a multi-regional company called Millennium Digital Media.

The respective buyers saw new fortunes to be made in cable-modem services and expanded “digital cable” channel selections.

So now, AT&T Cable customers can get the likes of TV Land, BBC America, the Food Network, the Game Show Network, and several other specialty channels offering prime examples of TV programming at its most direct; shows that come close to the Platonic ideals of entertainment and info programming.

Last month, Millennium trotted out its own digital channel lineup. For dozens more bucks a month, you can get dozens more premium and pay-per-view movie channels.

And nothing else.

This is way wrong. Television and video are more than just post-theatrical transmission mechanisms for feature films. TV has its own family of program genres.

A feature film is a one-shot. It’s constructed of scenes, which are constructed of individual shots. Even a low-budget film is made with this kind of rigorous pre-planning.

A TV show is usually an ongoing operation; a premise built to last a hundred episodes or more.

A TV show is built of segments; some of which may intercut across different scenes of action. These segments are, in traditional studio-based productions, made with several cameras running at once; this means individual “scenes” involve continuous flows of acting, movement, etc., rather than individual shots cut together to simulate continuity.

Because of time/money constraints, and the need for ongoing viewer identification with characters, TV shows are much more dialogue-heavy than features.

(Among other effects, this means social-theorists who use TV viewing as evidence of “the decline of words” are almost hilariously misinformed. TV’s all about words; though some of those words are better-chosen than others.)

Movies are about sitting in the dark, with a few friends and a lot of strangers, sharing in one larger-than-life sensory experience. TV’s about sitting comfortably in a well-lit room, alone or with a few pals and/or relatives, paying greater or lesser attention to a succession of smaller-than-life spectacles.

Aside from documentaries and occasional episodic films like Tales From the Darkside, movies are almost always dramatized works telling a single fictional (or fictionalized) story over the course of 80 to 180 minutes.

TV shows, in contrast, encompass episodic sitcoms, ongoing serials, limited-run serials (miniseries), anthology dramas, quasi-anthology dramas (such as crime shows where only the detectives appear in more than one episode), nonfiction storytelling (documentaries, newsmagazines, “reality” shows), and other formats that exist in no other medium.

The success of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? proves that audiences, even in a cable-fragmented TV universe with umpteen movie channels, are still attracted to pure-TV entertainment when it’s done right.

If only Millennium Digital could understand that.

TOMORROW: Are transit authorities passively capitulating to tax-cutters or sneaking an activist end-run around them?

ELSEWHERE:

• This guide to finding titles for would-be blockbuster novels only covers the “The (Noun) (Noun)” variety. It’d have been more interesting if it also included the intercaps “NounVerb” cliche….
• Some borderline-disturbing “Questions For Women” (found by Bring the Rock)….

ST. PETER TO GENE RAYBURN: “If I’d known you were coming I’d have prepared your (blank).”

YESTERDAY, we reported about Kentucky developers’ plans to build a 100-acre “Great Northwest” theme park south of Tacoma. They claim it will “highlight the ‘rugged outdoors’ elements of the Northwest, as well as its history.”

Today, we continue our imagined trek through what we think an NW-themed tourist attraction ought to be.

Having already witnessed Seasonal-affective-disorderland, Clearcutland, and Sprawlland, you move on (very, very slowly) in your SUV-replica tram car on the Ex-Country Road Traffic Jam Ride, on your way to your next destination–

• Gatesland. After the long Traffic Jam Ride, the kids will rush for the chance to stretch their legs and run through the Office Cubicle Maze.

  The grownups, meanwhile, will be corralled into a cavernous meeting room to hear the Animatronic Bill robot (surrounded, as always, by a dozen animatronic yes-men) either (1) praise his legacy of innovation, or (2) map strategies for “embracing” other companies’ ideas and running said companies out of business.

  A short corridor leads into the next meeting room, also known as–

• Processland. You’re now watching a two-part dramatized farce. A panel of animatronic city bureaucrats sit with the stoicism of London palace guards while animatronic activists rant on and on (via electronically speeded-up voices) about assorted social ills. Suddenly, two human actors (playing the only characters in the piece the producers choose to depict as human) rush on stage, demanding hefty municipal subsidies for a new upscale-caviar store. At once, the bureaucrat robots spring to “life,” shuffle some papers, and promptly approve the proposal on a voice vote.

  The victorious upscale couple invites everyone in the audience to come celebrate this important victory for the city’s future, and leads everyone off toward–

• Condoland. Nosh at the Gourmet Hummus Snack Bar. Partake of the finest no-host beverages. Eavesdrop on upscale costume characters chattering about what a crime it is for government to dare interfere with business, and why citizens who don’t support caviar-store subsidies are lacking the will to greatness.

  In the corner of your eye, you spot a pair of nose-ringed beverage servers walking down a hidden passageway. You follow them down what seem like 10 flights’ worth of stairs to–

• Boholand. You can see the faint remnants of a painted-over “Grungeland” sign at the entrance; next to the sign announcing the area’s new name.

  You can also see people you’ve run into earlier today. Previously, they were ride operators, tour ushers, and snack-counter servers. Now, they’re dressed in art smocks, Beatnik-chick black sweaters, ballet tights, leather G-strings, BSA-logo biker jackets, or drag gowns. They invite you to share their Triscuit-based hors d’oeuvres and wine-in-a-box, while they explain to you how everything in Boholand used to completely suck, but now it all completely sucks in totally different ways.

  As your eyes adjust to the dim lights, you can see signs posted around the black-painted room. The signs announce that various corners have been condemned for an expanded Condoland. Eventually, you also see a sign that promises “Only Way Out.” It turns out to be a short cut back to Seasonal-affective-disorderland.

  It’s not that you can’t leave the park, but that you’re not supposed to ever want to.

TOMORROW: Imagining life after Microsoft.

ELSEWHERE:

• This story gets it a bit wrong. The culture-monopoly issue isn’t really the U.S. vs. the rest of the world, it’s Hollywood and Madison Avenue vs. the rest of the world, including the rest of the U.S….
• “The more you play with them, the more they learn.” (found by Grouse)….

ANOTHER HOLIDAY SHOPPING SEASON begins tomorrow.

And in Webland, that means one (1) thing: Pundit pieces pondering how much biz the leading e-commerce shopping sites will generate, and what, if anything, the old tangible-location retailers might do in response.

The retail giants might very well be scrambling to confront the online threat in the future. But for now, their attitude seems to be business as usual, or even business more than usual.

Frequent readers to this site know how I’ve been tracking the rise of ever-bigger, ever-more-consolidated chain-store outposts. The accumulated result hit me a couple nights ago when I went on a pre-holiday-rush walking tour of my local brave-new downtown.

Aside from the Bon Marche, the Pike Place Market complex, the Ben Bridge jewelry store, and the Rite Aid (ex-Pay Less, ex-Pay n’ Save) drug store, every major space in Seattle’s retail core had either changed hands, been completely rebuilt, or both in the past 13 or so years. And only a handful of smaller businesses were still where they used to be (among them: M Coy Books, the Mario’s and Butch Blum fashion boutiques, a Sam Goody (nee Musicland) record store, and a Radio Shack).

All else was change. Chains going under (Woolworth, Kress, Klopfenstein’s, J.K. Gill) or pulling out of the region (Loehmann’s) or retreating to the malls (J.C. Penney, Weisfield’s Jewelers, Dania Furniture). Other chains pushing their way in (Borders, Barnes & Noble, Tiffany, Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, Men’s Wearhouse, Sharper Image, Ross Dress for Less, Shoe Pavilion, Warner Bros. Studio Store, Old Navy, FAO Schwarz, etc. etc.). Local mainstays dying off (Frederick & Nelson, the Squire Shops, and now Jay Jacobs); others expanding (Nordstrom, Eddie Bauer, REI, Seattle’s Best Coffee) or at least moving about (Roger’s Clothing for Men).

Now, the ex-Nordstrom building (actually three buildings straddling the same half-block) is reopening, one carved-out individual chain storefront at a time.

(When the building was first being reconfigured, I actually had a dream about the building being turned into artists’ studios; something that now is unlikely to ever happen–unless e-commerce really does bite into old-style retail during the next decade, and these fancy-schmancy chains all pull out at once).

First to open in the ex-Nordstrom was an all-Adidas store that actually looks homey compared to the Niketown a half-block away. Other shops, apparently all chain-owned (including Urban Outfitters) will move into the divvied-up spaces during and after the holiday shop-O-rama time.

But the project’s biggest and most elaborate storefront thus far belongs to Coldwater Creek, selling pseudo-outdoorsy clothes and home furnishings for rich software studs with $2 million “cabins” in the woods or on the water.

It’s a catalog operation based in Sandpoint, ID; a town known in the news for the various far-right nasties (Klansmen, militias, Y2K-survival compounds) who’ve moved to the surrounding countryside. But a more relevant-to-today’s-discussion aspect is Sandpoint’s recent status as one of the “Little Aspens” dotting the inland West, once-rustic little hamlets colonized by Hollywood types (including, in Sandpoint’s case, Nixon lawyer turned game-show host Ben Stein).

Ever since the first department stores first offered the allure of couture-style fashions without custom-made prices, upscale retailers have been in the biz of selling fantasies. The fantasy sold by Coldwater Creek is the one sold in SUV ads. The fantasy of living “on the land” without having to work on it, without being dependent upon a rural economy.

It’s the fantasy depicted in magazine puff pieces about folks like Ted Turner in Montana and Harrison Ford in Wyoming–the sort of folks I described a couple weeks back as pretending to “get away from it all” while really bringing “it all” with them. Folks who commute from their work in other states by private plane, then preach to the locals (or to those locals who haven’t been priced out of the place) about eco-consciousness and living lightly.

TOMORROW: Continuing this topic, a hypermarket chain takes over a steel-mill site and builds a store that looks like a steel mill.

IN OTHER NEWS: The outfit known for syrupy background music, AND which employed innumerable loud-guitar musicians in day jobs, is moving away.

ELSEWHERE:

• Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the movies….
• Just because I’ve read at one of their stores doesn’t mean I can’t share a cheap gag at a chain bookstore’s expense (found by Camworld)….
• The Bud Girls aren’t the first instance of companies trying to associate beer with one’s first beverage (found by the Obscure Store and Reading Room)….

ON MONDAY AND TUESDAY, I’d discussed Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian tract.

In it, a “refined” young man of 1880s Boston awakens from a 113-year trance to find himself in the all-enlightened, worry-free Year 2000. The doctor who’d revived him (and the doc’s comely daughter) then spend the rest of the book telling him how wonderful everything has become.

The chief feature of Bellamy’s future is a singular, government-run “Industrial Army” that owns all the means of production and distribution, employs every citizen aged 21-45 (except child-bearing women), and pays everybody the same wage (less-desirable jobs offer shorter hours or other non-monetary perks).

Obviously, nothing like that ever happened. Soviet communisim was a police-state regime that used egalitarian ideals to justify its brutality. Euro-socialism featured government-owned industrial companies that operated just like privately-owned companies, only less efficiently and less profitably.

But could Bellamy’s fantasy have ever worked in anything close to its pure form? Undoubtedly not.

It would’ve required that everybody (or at least enough people to impose their will on the rest) submit to a single, purified ideology based on rationality and selflessness. Any uncensored history of any major religious movement shows how impossible that is, even within a single generation.

We are an ambitious and competitive species. The “rugged individualist” notion, long exploited by U.S. corporations and advertisers, has a real basis in human nature.

We are also a diverse species. Especially in the U.S. whose citizens are gathered from the whole rest of the world. Bellamy’s totalized mass society would require a social re-engineering project even greater, and more uprooting, than that of the steam-age society he’d lived in. The kindly-doctor character’s insistence that all these changes had coalesced peacefully, as an inevitable final stage of industrial consolidation, may be the least likely-seeming prediction in the whole tome.

As I wrote previously, most utopian fantasies require that everybody in a whole society conform to the writer’s prescribed sensibility. (Some even require that everybody belong to the writer’s own gender or race.)

In most cases, the prescribed sensibility is that of a writer, or at least of a planner–ordered, systematic, more knowledgeable about structures than about people.

The impossibility of such monocultural utopias hasn’t stopped writers and planners from thinking them up. But at least some folks are realizing any idealized future has to acknowledge that people are different from one another and always will be.

We’ll talk more about this idea of a post-mass, post-postmodern future in future weeks.

TOMORROW: Musings on Biggest-Shopping-Day Eve.

ELSEWHERE:

• Who sez death can’t be creative?…
• Twin Peaks still holds up after 10 years, to me and to my ol’ pal Jim Emerson….
• The changing American workplace means new types of repetitive-stress injuries…

ONE OF MY FAVORITE Net-centric literary forms is the funny list. Not necessarily the faux-Letterman type, but the more informal, longer, add-on-your-own type.

Among my favorites: The “Ways to Annoy Your Roommate” list.

A few days ago, I suddenly had an idea for a perfect annoy-your-roommate concept that I hadn’t seen on any such lists: Rent porn videos, and fast-forward past everything EXCEPT the dialogue scenes.

That simple idea led to a more elaborate one: Rent porn videos, and then use a second VCR to copy only the dialogue scenes.

Then I got to thinking: These throwaway plot parts constitute one of today’s most ephemeral commercial-art genres. A genre that should be studied and preserved.

That one notion, natch, led to more.

There are plenty of such genres and forms, still underdocumented by a popcult-scholar racket still obsessed with Madonna deconstructions. Here are some:

• ‘Annoy Your Roommate’ lists and their ilk themselves.
• Chat rooms. My ol’ pal Rob Wittig insists, “I’m convinced we’re living in the Golden Age of Correspondence — comparable to Shakespeare’s era.” A few people have tried to create email novels as late-modern updates to the 19th-century epistolary novel. Wittig’s now working on a chat-room novel, a larger-scale version of the email novel with more characters “on stage” at once and with the added premise that the characters are “typing” their lines in real time.
• Telemarketing scripts and junk-phone-call recordings. In some future, more enlightened age, citizens will wonder why companies ever thought such intimately annoying messages could persuade.
• Movie and TV spinoff novels. Cousins of, and oft confused with, tie-in novels (the ones that reiterate the on-screen stories, which themselves are sometimes based on a prior novel). Examples: The Star Wars paperbacks that starred Han Solo and Chewbacca (and none of the other movie characters); or the Brady Bunch and Partridge Family mystery novels (a young Dean Koontz supposedly wrote some of these under pseudonymns).
• Internet-company promo trinkets. Anyone who goes to the High Tech Career Expo or a computer convention gets tons of ’em: Caps, T-shirts, Frisbees, yo-yos, hacky-sack balls, pen-and-pencil sets, coffee mugs, and other semi-ephemeral goods bearing the logos of companies whose only physical presence might be rented office space, whose “products” exist only on server files, and whose prospects for survival (or even profitability) are anyone’s guess.

  Somebody already put out a picture book showing old Apple Computer employee T-shirts. Somebody else could create a similar, but fictional, book using logos and slogans to depict the rise and fall of an Internet startup from its first big idea, to its venture-capital phase, to its unsuccessful IPO attempt, to its “restructuring for the future” downsizing phase, to its Chapter 11 reorganization, to its last appearance on a shirt “celebrating” another company’s acquisition of its remaining assets.

TOMORROW: A newspaper for the digital age.

ELSEWHERE:

• I can remember when high-school girls were kicked out of school for wearing jeans–i.e., not showing enough skin….
• “Genetic engineers have proposed a tree which grows its own lights.” (Found by EatonWeb)….
• Harry Stephen Keeler didn’t really write mysteries but “coincidence porn” (found by Arts & Letters Daily)….
• Seattle’s now #3 on somebody’s annual “Good Places to Live” survey, weighted toward supposed middle- and upper-middle-class priorities (cost of single-family homes, personal security, supply of professional jobs, etc.). #1: Salt Lake (apparently, nightlife and ethnic diversity aren’t on the survey’s criteria)….

TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to the memory of Wendy Testaburger, Mrs. McCormick, Ms. Crabtree, and Principal Victoria.

AS YOU MAY ALREADY KNOW, I have this thing about San Francisco.

I happen not to think it’s The Absolutely Greatest Damn City That Ever Existed On the Face of the Earth.

In fact, I am of the sometimes unpopular opinion that it’s an arrogant, pretentious land of egos and attitudes, where real artists and writers are far outnumbered by incessantly self-promoting “counterculture celebrities,” many of whom are merely famous-for-being-infamous.

For years, I’ve pleaded with my fellow Seattleites (particularly those in the restaurant and DJ-music businesses). I’ve told them they were trying too hard to follow Frisco-set trends, and not trying hard enough to come up with their own thangs.

All this time, I had a personal image of my own town as not “nicer,” but as more honest. Seattle, I believed, was a place where real people could create real works.

My image, along with the more popular “nice” image of the NW compared to Calif., was in many aspects a subset of the popular image of Canada as compared to the US–a more down-to-earth, honest place, but also a more inconsequential place, a place that seems “innocent” precisely because nothing that happens in it really matters to the larger world.

In recent years, as anyone with a computer surely knows, things happening in Seattle have indeed come to matter to the larger world.

I’ve seen this city develop an attitude and a style all its own.

And guess what? I’m getting to be just as frustrated by the New Seattle as I was of Old Frisco.

The simple knee-jerk response would be to allege “Californication,” to blame everything I don’t like here on them pesky newcomers from down southward. But that would be wrong.

Most everything that bugs me about today’s Brave New Seattle has deep roots in the city’s and the region’s heritage. (Kind of like an inherited susceptability to certain cancers.)

Suburban Assault Vehicles lumbering through the strip-mall parking lots? Nothing could be more Nor’Wester than the craving to feel like you’ve conquered Nature.

Dumb upscale restaurants? Because Washington’s required places selling hard booze to also sell full meals, this town’s always been restaurant-heavy. It’s just that in the competitive climate, these restaurants get pricier and sillier every year.

Real estate hyperinflation rapidly turning this into a city only welcome for the kinds of people who go to dumb upscale restaurants? Darn near nothing symbolizes the NW quite like looking for a buck (or a lot of bucks) to be made anywhere and anyhow. Clear those forests; trap those furs; dam those rivers; make sweetheart deals with airlines that promise to go all-Boeing.

Microsoft? Bill Gates and Paul Allen both come from what passes for “old money” in this relatively newly white-settled region. The infamous MS arrogance can be seen as a cross between Seattle leaders’ classic knack for backroom dealmaking and a rugged-individual pioneer spirit gone horribly extreme.

When Washington state’s own Edward R. Murrow exposed Sen. Joe McCarthy’s corrupt red-baiting tactics on early TV, he quoted Shakespeare to paint McCarthy as a mere exploiter of popular sentiment: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not within the stars but within ourselves.”

Similarly, much as I’d like to, I can’t blame San Franciscans (or attempts to emulate San Franciscans) for what Seattle has become. The fault is, indeed, within ourselves.

TOMORROW: Some ephemeral art forms of the late-century era.

ELSEWHERE:

• Douglas Rushkoff apologizes for “selling ‘cool’ to corporate America” (found by Arts & Letters Daily)….
• Who’da thunk it? Game shows are back! (found by TV Barn)….

AS PREVIOUSLY NOTED, my cable company finally restored the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. to my local cable lineup recently.

CBC’s got a lot of great Canadian-made programming (though its audiences and budgets have fallen during the Cable Age, as have those of the old-line U.S. networks).

But my favorite CBC attraction is a British import, the prime-time soap Coronation Street.

“The Street,” as it’s called in the UK tabloid press, will begin its 40th year this December. Most of those years it’s been the country’s most popular show, and the backbone of the commercial ITV network.

But you’ve probably never seen it. Apart from northern U.S. regions that get CBC, the show’s only Stateside exposure came when the USA Network ran it for a few months in the early ’80s, as part of a package deal to get reruns of the miniseries Brideshead Revisited (both shows are from the Granada production company). But American audiences apparently couldn’t decipher some of the characters’ heavy Yorkshire accents; USA dropped the show as soon as it contractually could.

So in 1985, when the BBC devised its own Street knockoff show, EastEnders, they made sure the characters would all be comprehensible when the show was shipped Stateside. Thus, EastEnders plays to loyal audiences on scattered PBS afiliates and the BBC America cable channel.

But there’s nothing like the original.

The Street has a feel all its own. It comes from the “music” of the accents and the dialogue (like EastEnders, Coronation Street uses no background music), the rhythm and pacing of the scenes (few lasting longer than a minute), the lovable non-“beauty” of the cast (even the teenage characters are as awkward-looking as real-life teens often believe themselves to be), the character-driven storylines, and the respect the show gives both to its audience and to its working-class characters.

The Street was launched when “kitchen sink” realism was all the rage in British literary and film drama. The show reflects that era in its tightly-sewn format, chronicling some two dozen people who live and/or work on a single block in a fictional industrial town outside Manchester.

There’s no glamour (the show’s wealthiest character merely owns a small garment factory), and no overwrought melodrama beyond the limited scope and ambitions of the characters.

What there is, is a community–an extended, close-knit, multi-generational family of people who may argue and fight and cheat but who ultimately love one another. Just the sort of community that late-modern suburban North America sorely lacks, and which those “New Urbanist” advocates always talk about trying to bring back.

A couple years back, CBC began its own Street imitation, Riverdale (no relation to the town in Archie Comics). While Riverdale’s creators seem to have made every effort to replicate every possible element of the Street formula, it doesn’t quite translate. Riverdale’s relatively emotionally-repressed Ontarians, living in relatively large, set-back private homes rather than the Street’s row houses, have far less of the interaction and adhesion seen on the Street.

USA’s said to be developing its own working-class evening soap along the Coronation Street/EastEnders/Riverdale style. It’ll be interesting to see if the formula can even work in the setting of today’s disconnected American cityscape.

IN OTHER NEWS: Another Northwest Bookfest came and went. This year, it was moved from the funky ol’ rotting Pier 63 to the clean, spacious (and about to be made even more spacious) Washington State Convention Center. While the move was made for practical, logistical reasons, it could also be interpreted as signifying a move “up” from the homey, rustic realm of the Northwest-writing stereotype (beach poetry, low-key “quirky” mysteries, and snow falling on you-know-what). Even litter-a-chur, the festival’s new setting implies, has gotta get with the program and become just as aggressively upscale and as fashionably commercial as everything else in Seatown’s becoming.

TOMORROW: Strange junk e-mails and other fun stuff.

ELSEWHERE:

• Every time I read a women-only panel discussion about porn videos, I long to one day see a buncha guys discussing Harlequin novels as if they accurately represented all women’s real desires. (I’m sure some semiotics prof has done such an essay, but damned if I’m gonna read any more deconstructionist theory than I have to.)…

(Advisory: Today’s installment deals with topics some readers might find kinda gross.)

IN THE ’80S, RON HARRIS created and produced the TV exercise shows Aerobicise and The :20 Minute Workout.

You may remember them as the shows with the ever-perky spandex queens thrusting their butts out while on a slowly-turning white turntable, before an equally stark white backdrop.

Aerobicise, which aired on Showtime, treated the exercises as a voyeuristic spectator sport. Scenes were shot to emphasize “arty” camera angles and close-up body parts in motion, rather than to show how viewers could imitate any particular sequence of movements.

The syndicated :20 Minute Workout (excerpted during a scene in Earth Girls Are Easy) at least purported to be a participatory, instructional show. (The heavily Southern-accented hostess tried to make a catch phrase out of “Fo’ mo’, three mo’, two mo,’ and one. Take it down.”)

While the shows made no legally-binding promises to viewers, they certainly implied that you could work your way toward a supermodel physique.

Later, Harris went on to producing softcore “erotic” videos for Playboy and his own production company. These used the same turntable set and similar body-choreography as Aerobicise, but showing skin instead of skin-tight suits.

Now, Harris is embarking on a publicity stunt of questionable taste which essentially says no, workouts won’t work out. Ya gotta be born beautiful ‘n’ sexy.

Or, to quote a slogan on the site selling stills from Harris’s nudie videos, “Not all pussy was created equal.”

To add to the overall air of sleaze surrounding Harris’s supposed online auction of glamour-model eggs, the USA Today story about it quotes a couple of the models as saying they’re doing this because they don’t want to pose nude to pay their bills; even though Harris’s video and photo sites promise un-augmented breasts, full spread shots, and lotsa hot girl-on-girl action.

(The models on the egg-auction site are not identified as having ever worked on Harris’s other projects. But Feed found a few faces that appeared on “Ron’s Angels” and also on Harris’s more explicit sites.)

Even odder, Harris claims on his auction site that you might as well buy into the kinds of prejudices denounced in books like The Beauty Myth. “Choosing eggs from beautiful women,” Harris vows, “will profoundly increase the success of your children and your children’s children, for centuries to come.”

Particularly if they’re willing to appear in “tasteful” photo shoots called “Girls Who Love Girls.” (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

In the end, word finally filtered up to clueless mainstream news media that this was, indeed, almost certainly a cyberhoax.

Maybe Harris is a better showman than I’d given him credit for. Maybe his next stunt could pretend to offer the eggs or sperm of clever hustlers, for parents who want to raise future Net entrepreneurs.

IN OTHER NEWS: My cable company’s just started showing ZDTV, the all-computer-news channel–sorta. On the cable system’s schedule channel, where the TV Guide Channel video inserts normally go in a quarter or a half of the screen, I’m getting that portion of the visual portion of ZDTV. The TV Guide Channel audio remains, leading to some quite interesting juxtapositions–particularly during commercial breaks….

MONDAY: Postmodern fiction, trashing old hierarchies or just building new ones?

ELSEWHERE:

• You had to know egg-auction parody sites would quickly show up….
• This fake sex-machine ad would be funny if I weren’t suspicious somebody somewhere’s trying to invent something like it for real (found by Bud)….

YESTERDAY, we discussed a would-be commercial “alternative” magazine that wasn’t quite fiscally making it, and how it would probably have to find a business plan that didn’t require big corporate advertisers.

There’s a class of what might be called “ground level” zines (slicker than underground fanzines but rougher than corporate mags) that basically run on the business plan of expecting to lose money, and coming out as often as, or as long as, their publishers can subsidize them.

One of the more durable of these was Ben Is Dead. In tiny type on cheap newsprint, it relished in adoration or at least obsession with many of the relics of late-modern life–Sassy, Beverly Hills 90210, childhood memories, Marvel Comics, underwear, etc. etc.

But after some 30 issues in 11 years, publisher Darby Romeo has finally quit. Like the makers of Factsheet Five, Fizz, and several other ground-levels that have gone away in recent years, she’s decided to move on in her life.

A piece at Feed claims the end of Ben Is Dead forebodes the end of the whole Zine Revolution, an explosion of self-expressions that got underway in the early ’80s with cheap photocopying and desktop publishing.

Nowadays, the Feed essay notes, it’s easier (and just as materially unrewarding) to put up a personal website.

From my own 5.5-year experience in newsletter self-publishing, I could certainly see how the excitement of accumulating piles of print can begin to wear off. But I also see personal publishing as, well, a personal endeavor, one it’s perfectly OK to leave when you want to do something else.

Ben Is Dead is not a “failure” for not being continued, and Romeo’s certainly not “giving up.”

A personal zine is also a product of its times. Back in the ’80s and early ’90s, the rough-hewn look of many ground-level zines was an appropriate visualization of a DIY aesthetic opposed to old bureaucratic communications media. But in today’s go-go-go-getter cyber-economy, everybody’s supposed to be a young entrepreneur, and homemade-looking media can sometimes be perceived as simply the work of young entrepreneurs who aren’t doing it right.

I’ve seen newer ground-level zines, such as ROCKRGRL, Bust, and The Imp, which put their messages into more elaborate, more “professional” looking (but still un-corporate) designs. Will these go on to enjoy long lives? Maybe, or maybe their makers will move on to still-newer concepts.

Zines are no more dead than print media in general.

And, no, print media in general isn’t dead either.

IN OTHER NEWS: Seattle’s news media finally found something more important than Ken Griffey Jr. leaving town–specifically, a chance to spend seven hours of commercial-free live TV ruthlessly exploiting a minor tragedy; complete with lingering helicopter shots of police dogs wandering around clueless and scentless.

IN STILL OTHER NEWS: Who had the first commercial on South Park’s virulent anti-Pokemon episode? That’s right–Magic: The Gathering, from the now-Hasbro-owned outfit that also makes the Pokemon card game.

TOMORROW: Ron Harris’s journey from phony workout videos to phony human-egg auctions.

ELSEWHERE:

• I like Jack Kerouac’s writing. I don’t like most other people’s writings about Jack Kerouac. Except for this piece….
• Saul Bellow on writing’s non-obsolescence…
• How to offend people in 47 different languages (found by Memepool)…./UL>
  

THERE’S A MAGAZINE you probably haven’t seen called Speak.

It’s from Frisco, and bears all the traits of all those other Frisco “alternative” magazines that have come (and mostly gone) over the past decade and a half.

Specifically: It’s ruthlessly hipper-than-thou, parading a succession of counterculture celebrity profiles and essays on why these celebs and their worshippers are supposedly some intellectually/aesthetically/morally superior species to all us non-Californian redneck hicks.

Like many of those prior magazines (The Nose, Might, Mondo 2000) already have, Speak is running out of money and may have to fold. But publisher Dan Rolleri isn’t going down without a fight.

Rolleri’s tried to sell ads to big youth-appeal advertisers like Nike and Calvin Klein and the major record labels. So far, he’s had few major takers, except from two Seattle outfits (Fantagraphics and the Alibi Room) and from the Philly-based “hip ad agency” representing Goldschlager liquors and Red Kamel cigarettes.

Speak doesn’t really look like a forum for slick consumer ads; it’s all black-and-white inside, it uses hard-to-read headline type effects, and it only comes out every two or three months.

But that hasn’t stopped Rolleri from complaining.

In two consecutive editorials, he’s ranted on about how the would-be big advertisers wanted him to make his mag more sponsor-friendly. Consumer-product manufacturers wanted colorful features about the buying and using of consumer products (PCs, sports gear, fashions, etc.). Record and movie companies wanted long, glowing stories (preferably cover stories) about celebrities the media companies were currently hyping.

In short, nothing like Rolleri’s idea of a true “alternative” publication.

To paraphrase that immortal cartoon character Super Chicken, Rolleri knew the job was dangerous when he took it.

From the grisly fates met by those prior Frisco mags, he should’ve realized that if he was going to insist on a format different from (or in opposition to) those of today’s big corporate media, he’d have to have a business plan that didn’t depend on big corporate sponsors.

After all, even big ad-friendly mags often don’t turn a profit for as long as five years.

Speak’s website contains precious little content. The best online source for Rolleri’s anti-advertiser rants is an anti-Rolleri rant in Salon (which is also Frisco-based and money-losing, but which, as a dot-com company, is able to attract venture-capital support). The Salon piece claimed Rolleri was wrong to claim ad-friendly magazines are “dumbed down” only to appease advertisers, but rather that magazines are trashy and stupid because readers like ’em that way.

That’s a load of Libertarian bull.

Ad-supported media live and die, not on the whims of audiences, but on the whims of advertisers. CBS has more total viewers than the other broadcast networks this season, but The WB has more of the particular viewers sponsors give a damn about. The NY Daily News has more New York-area readers than the NY Times, but far fewer ad pages.

The task of Speak or anything like it is to build and service a community of readers without the likes of Nike.

IN OTHER NEWS: Judy Nicastro and incumbent Peter Steinbrueck were the only self-styled “progressive bloc” candidates to win Seattle City Council seats, thus ensuring two more years of the rancor and bitterness we’ve grown to love. Meanwhile, the state Initiative 695, which gave tiny tax breaks to ordinary car-owners and humongous breaks to luxury-SUV owners, passed handsomely. My theory why: The proponents used every trick of talk-radio demagoguery to proclaim themselves the “rebels” against authority figures, while the opponents used big bucks and barrages in all the other local media to basically tell voters that all the authority figures wanted them to vote no. Next step: Lawsuits.

IN STILL OTHER NEWS: The shock of the biggest intentional walk in regional sports history was only partly allieved by the Sonics’ opening win against the still-lowly LA Clippers, who, now that they’re sharing a space with the media-adored Lakers, seem even more the deliberately underemphasized #2 brand–sorta like the afternoon halves of jointly-owned newspaper monopolies (the late Spokane Chronicle, the late Minneapolis Star, etc.)

TOMORROW: Ben Is Dead is dead. Does that mean zines are dead too?

ELSEWHERE:

• Salon has finally discovered that The City That Thinks It’s God has turned from counterculture-snobville to cyber-snobville. I could’ve told ’em that years ago….
• An official site for perhaps the only San Franciscan artists obsessed with art above celebrity….