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SOMETIME LAST WEEK,MTV claimed to have played the one millionth music video (counting repeats) in the cable channel’s 19-year history.
You probably didn’t even notice. The channel didn’t even bother to plant hype stories the channel planted in newspapers about the “achievement.” (The clip chosen to represent the milestone: Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer.”)
Once the #1-rated basic cable channel, MTV’s ratings have steadily declined. (A recent, laudatory Forbes article touted the successful launches of localized MTV channels around the world, but tellingly said nothing about the U.S. original.)
What’s more, the channel’s more exclusively than ever drawing teen and young-adult audiences, who (despite being incessantly wooed by every channel from NBC to UPN) proportionately watch far less TV of any type than any other age group.
The problem’s not that ex-viewers like me grew older while MTV didn’t. It’s that MTV has indeed grown old; or at least tired.
Briefly, during its mid-’80s to early-’90s midlife, the channel was known for championing artistically flashy “breakthrough videos,” and also for breaking exciting new acts that threatened to stretch the boundaries of pop and rock.
Back in 1981, MTV had been routinely criticized for its lack of programming diversity. It mainly just showed hard-rock and top-40 acts, with a smattering of British “new wave” clips and almost no R&B or hiphop.
Today, during those hours when it isn’t re-re-rerunning five-year-old Real World episodes or Celebrity Deathmatch animations, MTV almost exclusively plays music from five, very rigidly-defined, genres:
Of course, as an integral part of the mainstream record-industry hype machine, MTV’s decline has parallelled the industry’s. With no real “top 40” mass market anymore, the industry has devolved and retreated into niches where it believes its big-promotion, big-marketing approach can still move CDs–the five genres listed above, plus the easy-listening acts played on VH1 (also owned, like MTV, by Viacom) and the pop-country acts played on TNN (soon to be owned by Viacom once its merger with CBS goes through).
TOMORROW: What’s in a (corporate) name?
ELSEWHERE:
FIRST OF ALL, a huge thanks to all who attended the group lit-fest I participated in last Sunday at Titlewave Books.
Whenever I do something like that, I pass out little questionnaires to the audience. Here are some of the responses to this most recent survey:
Favorite food/drink:
Favorite historical era:
Favorite website:
Favorite Pokemon character:
Favorite word:
What this decade should be called:
My biggest (non-money) wish for the year:
I think the Experience Music Project building looks like:
Favorite local band/musician:
The Seattle music scene’s biggest legacy/lesson?:
How I’d preserve artist and low-income housing:
What This Town Needs (other than construction projects):
MULTIPLE CHOICE PORTION
What should be done with Schell:
What should be done with Microsoft:
What should be done with Ken Griffey Jr.:
What I’d like in MISCmedia magazine:
I’d pay for MISCmedia magazine:
What I’d like on the MISCmedia website:
TOMORROW: Confessions of a Microsoft refugee.
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack and musician Dennis Rea.
SOME EVEN MISC.-ER ITEMS to peruse on your real-Washington’s-birthday non-holiday:
THE SECOND ISSUE of MISCmedia, the Magazine should be at subscribers’ mailboxes any day now. Thinking of subscribing? Here are some reasons why you should.
Reason one: If more once-a-month distro-pals don’t start helping out, we’re gonna have to cut back on the delivery of free copies around town.
Reason two: Subscribe during the March issue’s delivery cycle (approximately the next four weeks) and you’ll receive a cute little toy or trinket from our grab bag o’ goodies; including several giveaway doodads from the last High Tech Career Expo.
AD VERBS: The nationwide Azteca mexican-restaurant chain has discovered a shtick for associating its TV commercials with “authentic” Mexican culture of the pop variety. The spots closely resemble those telenovelas soap operas on Univision!
The stoic line readings, the over-drenched color schemes, the tearjerker situations–they’re all there.
The only differences are that the actors are speaking slightly-accented English and the ads are intentionally funny.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Redeye is a thick photocopy zine full of neo hiphop-graffiti style art and lettering, and articles about such popular national young-lefty topics as Mumia Abu-Jamal, “materialism and the lack of consciousness in hiphop,” coming of age in L.A., and Allen Ginsberg.
It’s also got a one-page essay repeating the fun but totally false rumor that the KFC restaurant chain changed its name from “Kentucky Fried Chicken” because the critters it serves up have been so genetically modified as to no longer legally qualify as chickens.
The tale’s gotten so widespread, the company has felt it necessary to put up a page debunking the hoax. The University of New Hampshire, referenced in some of the e-mail versions of the story, also has its own debunking page. Another telling of the story behind the story comes from About.com.
So you can be assured: KFC’s serving real chicken. Real often-greasy chicken, in often-small portions, served up by a global giant currently using a (re-)animated icon of its dead founder talking like a dorky white mall-rapper.
(Another untrue rumor Redeye didn’t know about: the one that claimed KFC’s profits went to the Ku Klux Klan.)
TOMORROW: Search engine fun.
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
YESTERDAY, we started discussing the fantasy universe promoted in those new rah-rah, way-new business magazines, Fast Company and Business 2.0.
But business writing and advice seems to be everywhere.
CNBC runs 15 hours a day of financial coverage. CNN and Fox News Channel have been adding additional hours of money talk to their daytime lineups. Satellite dishes offer the all-day, all-nite stock-talkin’ and number-flashin’ of CNNfn and Bloomberg TV.
There’s a site called GreenMagazine.com that claims to be “about attaining the freedom to do what you want to do,” with investment tips and celebrity financial-advice interviews with the likes of Emo Phillips.
Even Jesse Jackson has a money guidebook called It’s About the Money. In it, Jackson and his Congressmember son talk about financial planning as “The Fourth Movement of the Freedom Symphony” for minority and working-class Americans.
While the Jacksons’ main lessons are pretty basic stuff (get out of debt, avoid those hi-interest credit cards, start saving, build home equity), it’s still more than a bit disconcertin’ to see the onetime Great Lefty Hope now traveling the talk-show circuit with the same subject matter as the Motley Fools.
Perhaps it’s time this website and print magazine got with the program. I can see it now:
“Welcome to the “Your Money” column in MISCmedia. The reason we call it “Your Money” is because we don’t have any; so if any money is going to be talked about, it will have to be yours. “Take some of Your Money out of your wallet right now. Note the way it feels; that crisp, freshly-ironed feel of genuine rag-content fiber that ages so beautifully during a bill’s circulation lifetime. Note the elegant, Douglas Fir-like green ink on one side; the solemn black ink on the other. Admire the intricate engraving detail in the president’s face in the middle of the bill. “Now, if the bill you’re holding has an abornally large and off-center presidential portrait, there’s a slight but present chance that you may be passing counterfeit currency–a serious federal crime. “You can avoid arrest and prosecution by sending any such units to MISCmedia, 2608 Second Avenue, P.M.B. #217, Seattle, Washington 98121. “Real money. Accept no substitutes.”
“Welcome to the “Your Money” column in MISCmedia. The reason we call it “Your Money” is because we don’t have any; so if any money is going to be talked about, it will have to be yours.
“Take some of Your Money out of your wallet right now. Note the way it feels; that crisp, freshly-ironed feel of genuine rag-content fiber that ages so beautifully during a bill’s circulation lifetime.
Note the elegant, Douglas Fir-like green ink on one side; the solemn black ink on the other. Admire the intricate engraving detail in the president’s face in the middle of the bill.
“Now, if the bill you’re holding has an abornally large and off-center presidential portrait, there’s a slight but present chance that you may be passing counterfeit currency–a serious federal crime.
“You can avoid arrest and prosecution by sending any such units to MISCmedia, 2608 Second Avenue, P.M.B. #217, Seattle, Washington 98121.
“Real money. Accept no substitutes.”
MONDAY: An involuntary single’s thoughts on Valentine’s Day.
IN OTHER NEWS: Hey Vern, Ernest’s dead. Future film historians will look at Jim Varney’s nine-film series as the late-century period’s last true heirs to the old lowbrow B-movie series comedies like The Bowery Boys and even the Three Stooges (also critically unappreciated at their times).
THE WIRED WEBSITE DIDN’T INVENT the banner ad, despite its official claims to have done so (Prodigy did). And Wired didn’t invent rah-rah way-new business writing.
Elbert Hubbard, Og Mandino, Napoleon Hill, and Steve Forbes’s late dad Malcolm all used to love pontificatin’ and philosophisin’ about industry as the driving force of the human race, commerce as the world’s noblest calling, and the businessman as rightful leader of all things.
All Wired did, and it’s an important little thing, was to marry this motivational pep-talk lingo to the hyperaggressive hipness of techno music and corporate-PoMo design, and to apply it not toward such old-economy trades as shoe selling but toward the Now-Now-Now realm of tech-mania.
But for all its self-promotin’ bluster, Wired never got the mythical sack of gold at the end of the publishing rainbow, and had to be sold to the Conde Nast oldline mag empire.
It’s taken a couple of other ventures to morph the concept into something more reader- and advertiser-friendly.
Wired treated the Way New Economy, ultimately, as just the replacement of an old elite by a new elite. Its fantasy-universe was a rarified hip-hierarchy centered in San Francisco and ruled by a clique of aging Deadheads working as strategic consultants to telecom and oil companies.
In contrast, both Fast Company and Business 2.0 depict the “revolution in business” as something anybody can, at least in theory, get in (and cash in) on. Both mags are thick with second-person features on how you and your firm can get connected, shake off those old tired procedures, and rev up for today’s supercharged Net-economy.
Fast Company (circulation 325,000) has become the cash cow of Mortimer Zuckerman’s publishing mini-empire, which has also included U.S. News & World Report, the N.Y. Daily News, and (until he recently sold it) the Atlantic Monthly.
Business 2.0 (circulation 240,000) has quickly become the American flagship of the British-owned Imagine Media, whose other “Media With Passion” titles include Mac Addict and the computer-game mag Next Generation.
Each of the two has its individual quirks, but they essentially play in the same league by the same rules.
And rules constitute the main theme of both magazines–breaking all the old rules, mastering all the new rules, and, with the right pluck and luck, getting to make some rules of your own.
One of the new rules, all but unspoken, is that everything in the reader’s life is apparently supposed to revolve around the ever-more-aggressive worship of Sacred Business. In the shared universe of Fast Company and Business 2.0, nothing exists that doesn’t relate to (1) amassing wealth and/or fame, (2) having adrenaline-rush fun while doing so, and (3) achieving the ideal life (or at least the ideal lifestyle) via the purchase of advertisers’ products.
Wired, for all its elitism and silliness, did and does acknowledge a larger universe out there. It always has at least a few items about how digitization is affecting art, music, politics, sex, food, architecture, charity, and/or religion.
In the world according to the way-new business magazines, however, none of those other human activities is considered worth mentioning even in passing. It’s as if all other realms of human endeavor are merely unwelcome distractions to the magazines’ fantasy reader, a hard-drivin’ entrepreneurial go-getter with no time for anything that doesn’t contribute to the bottom line.
Fast Company (which is slightly less totally business-focused than Business 2.0) did run a cover-story package last November about businesspeople (especially female ones) who find trouble balancing their careers with their other life-interests and duties.
But even then, second-person narcissism ruled the day. It was all about how You (by identifying with the articles’ case studies) could preserve your personal sanity, and hence become an even better cyber-warrior.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
IN OTHER NEWS: Last November, I wrote about the hit UK soap Coronation Street, which can be seen on the CBC in Canada (and on some Seattle-area cable systems) but not in the U.S. Since then, the Street has finally made its U.S. debut, on the CBC-co-owned cable channel Trio. The channel’s not on many cable systems yet, but you can get it on the DirecTV satellite-dish service.
FIRST, A THANKS to all however many or few of you listened to my bit Sunday afternoon on “The Buzz 100.7 FM.” The next aural MISCevent will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
TO USE A WORD popularized by a certain singer-songwriter on a certain record label, imagine.
Imagine a company founded on Emile Berliner’s original flat-disc recording patents; that held the original copyright to the “His Master’s Voice” logo.
Imagine a company that, before WWII, virtually controlled the record business in the Eastern Hemisphere. A company that could rightly proclaim itself “The Greatest Recording Organisation in the World.”
Imagine a company whose labs helped develop the technology of television as we still know it, equipped the world’s first regularly-scheduled TV station, and later controlled the production company that brought us Benny Hill and Danger Mouse.
Imagine a company that, by acquiring Capitol Records, attained the legacies of Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, and the Beach Boys.
Imagine a company that had the Beatles.
Now, imagine a company that squandered that vast advantage, via questionable investments in military electronics, movie theaters, real estate, TV-furniture rental shops, and an almost singlehanded drive to keep the British filmmaking industry alive (noble but fiscally ill-advised).
And so, after a decade of spinoffs and de-conglomeratizations and downsizings, it’s time for us all to use the words of a certain other singer-songwriter and say “EMI–Goodbye.”
What’s currently left of the EMI Music Group will be folded into a joint venture with the worldwide music assets of Time Warner, which is itself being acquired by America Online.
On the one hand, this means the end of the EMI/Capitol operation as a stand-alone entity.
On the other hand, it means AOL’s taken its first step at whittling away Time Warner’s media holdings; something I’d predicted a month ago. The new music operation would be much larger then TW’s current Warner Music Group, but would only be half owned by AOL/TW. AOL could easily siphon off additional pecentages, like TW used to do with its movie unit.
On the other other hand, it’s another milestone down the seemingly unending path of big-media consolidations. In the music business, that means six companies that once controlled an estimated 85 percent of all recorded-music sales are now down to four: Sony, AOL/TW/EMI, Seagram/Universal, and Bertlesmann/BMG. (Only Time Warner had been U.S.-owned; and now its record biz will be half-British owned.)
Despite the vast mainstream-media hurrahs over the AOL-TW merger (and this subsequent deal) as some bold new step toward the wired age, and the accompanying alternative-media bashing of what are perceived as ever more powerful culture trusts, we’ve got about as many major local/national media outlets as ever, some of which have broader product lines and which are, in practicality, no more or less politically center-right than they ever were.
What’s more, these companies often find their new wholes to be worth not much more than the sums of their former parts, even after the usual massive layoffs. The Warner Music Group had already been oozing sales and market share; one article put part of the reason on its decreasing ability to force the whole world to love its Anglophone superstars: “Warner has historically relied on distributing American acts around the world, but many overseas audiences are starting to prefer homegrown acts.”
The oft-hyped “synergy” among these under-one-roof media brands has never really worked out, and probably never will to any great extent. (Music historians may remember that the old CBS Records issued Bob Dylan’s antiwar song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” but CBS Television wouldn’t let him sing it on The Ed Sullivan Show.)
What the conglomerooneys can, and do, do is raise the stakes of entry–for their own kinds of stuff. You want to break out a choreographed, cattle-call-auditioned “boy band”? Better have a huge video budget, lots of gossip-magazine editor friends, good dealings with the N2K tour-promotion people, and the clout to tell MTV they won’t get an exclusive on your already-established “girl band” unless they also play your new “boy band.”
But if you’ve got a street-credible lady or gent who writes and sings honest stuff about honest emotions, you can still establish this act far better under indie-label means than via the majors.
Indeed, as certain acts I know who’ve been chewed up and spit out by the majors tell me, the behemoths get more incompetent every year at promoting or marketing anything. That may be why they’re devoting more and more effort to only the most easily marketed acts, and increasingly leaving the rest of the creative spectrum for the rest of us to discover on our own.
TOMORROW: The future of Utopias.
IN OTHER NEWS: Here are the Canadian government’s proposed graphic cigarette warning messages. The problem with these, as other commentators have already noted, is that teens will likely adore the gruesome death-imagery and hence smoke more. Just as the Philip Morris-funded antismoking commercials in the U.S. depict nonsmoking teens as hopeless geeks….
AH, THE NINETIES. Weren’t they just such A Simpler Time?
Only a mere 32 TV channels. Telephone modems that ran as fast as 28.8 kbps, and connected you to bulletin-board systems and the original Prodigy. Easy-to-hiss-at national villains like Newt Gingrich. Crude but understandable gender politics (anything “The Woman” did was presumed to be always right). A Seattle music scene in which all you had to do to be considered cool was to pronounce how Not-grunge you were.
All this and more was brought back when I re-viewed Kristine Peterson’s 1997 movie Slaves to the Underground, finally out on video.
It was a make-or-break “art film” career-change for director Peterson, who’d moved from Seattle to L.A. in the ’80s and had been stuck ever since in the career purgatory of directing direct-to-video horror movies, “erotic thrillers,” and Playboy Channel softcores. Its largely-local starring cast also all moved to L.A. after making the film. I don’t know of anything either they or Peterson has done since.
The plot is relatively simple. A Seattle slacker-dude zine publisher reconnects with an ex-girlfriend, who’d left him when they were both Evergreen students after a mutual acquaintance had raped her (she’d never told the ex-boyfriend about the attack). Now, she’s playing guitar in a riot grrrl band fronted by her lesbian lover. The ex-girlfriend leaves the lesbian lover, and the band, to re-hook-up with the ex-boyfriend, who vows to do anything for her (even go to work at Microsoft to support her musical career!).
All this is a mere premise for the film’s real purpose–depicting Peterson’s vision of oversimplified riot grrrl/slacker boy stereotypes. They’re basically the same old gender roles, only completely reversed. All the riot grrrls are depicted as stuck-up brats and/or sexist bigots. All the slacker dudes are depicted as shuffling, submissive cowards, deathly afraid of ever doing anything that might incur a woman’s wrath.
(Non-slacker males are shown in the form of the rapist “friend,” who appears briefly at the film’s start, and assorted right-wing authority figures; all of whom are depicted as fully deserving the riot grrrls’ vengeances. Non-riot-grrrl females do not appear at all.)
Aside from this annoying Hollywood oversimplification of sex roles, the rest of the film’s depiction of the seattle scene at the time is fairly accurate. The scenery (the Crocodile, Fallout Records, Hattie’s Hat restaurant, and the late Moe’s club) is right. So are the characters’ stated motivations–to make music and art and political action, not to Become Rock Stars. (A subplot toward the end, in which the riot-grrrl band is courted by an L.A. record label, is Peterson’s one betrayal of this.)
Slaves to the Underground is OK, but would undoubtedly had been better had Peterson not felt the need to dumb down the characters and the sexual politics to a level stupid Hollywood financiers could understand. The best fictionalization of the ’90s Seattle rock scene remains The Year of My Japanese Cousin (still not out on home video), made for PBS the previous year by Maria Gargiulo (sister of Fastbacks guitarist Lulu Gargiulo, who was the film’s cinematographer).
TOMORROW: Low-power radio, high-powered lobbying.
IN OTHER NEWS: Seattle Times wine columnist Tom Stockley was on the doomed Alaska Airlines flight from Mexico. I’d known his daughter Paige at the UW; my few recollections of him are of a decent enough gent, even though my punk-wannabe ideology made me pretty much opposed to the whole concept of wine writing…. Turns out a friend of mine had flown on that route just days before the crash. This is the third such near-miss among my circle. In ’96, another friend flew TWA from Paris to N.Y.C. en route to Seattle; that plane’s N.Y.C.-Paris return flight (which my friend wasn’t on) crashed. In ’98, I was on Metro bus route 359 exactly 24 hours before a disturbed passenger shot the driver, sending the bus plunging off the Aurora Bridge.
I KNOW A COMEDIAN who moved to L.A. to make it big in showbiz, and who’s currently in day-job work as a crew member on an awful made-for-cable crime show.
He sometimes tells stories about the Hollywood hustler mentality. The way he describes it, it’s even worse than the worst you’ve heard.
Of course, it’s one thing for hundreds of monomaniacal would-be alpha males to scramble around a field with profit potential, such as feature films or boy-band music videos. The hustling takes a different, even more desperate turn when applied in a sub-industry in apparent permanent decline–the production of weekly dramatic TV series.
The old-line networks have been losing audiences to cable and the Net and assorted other time-wasting opportunities. Cable channels will never have the individual reach to support the bloated production budgets producers are used to.
And now, the lure of low-budget entertainment has again reached the old broadcast networks, in the form of a once-moribund genre.
When Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? became a ratings smash in its first two mini-series mountings, the sitcom and cop-show crowd (and their coke dealers and call-girl suppliers) got paranoid, my source claims.
They saw the show as a direct threat to their own livelihoods. If the networks could achieve decent ratings from such low-budget productions, suddenly the careers of a few thousand L.A. “show runners,” producers, writers, set builders, “sticks with tits” beach-babe extras, stars, stars’ agents, stars’ personal trainers, celebrity “news” reporters, etc. etc. would be in dire peril.
So an effort has been made to kill Millionaire, the best way Hollywood knows how. By imitating it to death.
According to my correspondent’s story, production companies didn’t pitch Greed, Winning Lines, and Twenty-One to the networks in hopes these ripoff shows would succeed, but so that there’d be a quiz show glut that would shove Millionaire into a premature grave.
Hmmmm. Reminds me of a conspiracy theory that I once heard about the L.A. record industry.
Something about how, in the early part of the previous decade, the major labels and their fellow-travelers saw indie rock as a threat to the very street-credibility of corporate rock. So, supposedly, the majors signed, groomed and hyped the most derivative faux-“alternative” acts they could find. That way, “alternative rock” would be redefined as just another genre, a fad to be played out and discarded like any other.
There’s just one problem with such a theory: It requires that corporate music bosses be far more intelligent than all evidence has shown them to be.
And from what my comedian acquaintance says about corporate TV guys, they’re apparently not any smarter than corporate music guys.
So I could easily imagine the kill-Millionaire plot backfiring. Perhaps big-money, hard-quiz shows will have a short life atop the ratings. (Certainly the Millionaire knockoffs are all lamer than lame.) But that could just lead to other cheap hits–different types of game shows, or skit comedies, or variety shows, or any of the other assorted value-priced genres that have always been mainstays of TV schedules around the world. Maybe even an English-language Sabado Gigante that would combine all these concepts under one package.
It could result in a more fiscally-stable broadcasting biz, and also in shows that feature a more direct-seeming rapport between performers and audiences, instead of the slick, distanced blandness of most current Hollywood prime-time fare.
And if that happens, you expect the L.A. powers-that-be to get even more paranoid.
TOMORROW: Praying for Turkey.
IN OTHER NEWS: Four years ago, there were six major record companies. Now there are four; as EMI, the company of the Beatles and Edith Piaf, a company founded on Emile Berliner’s original flat-disc recording patents, falls to the consolidators.
IN OTHER OTHER NEWS: The matriarch of NW enviro-activism makes it to a third century but no more.
IN A RETAIL RECORD STORE (I’m going to try to avoid the term “brick and mortar,” which should’ve been on Matt Groening’s “Forbidden Words” list for this year), space limitations necessitate what you’ll get to choose from.
It’s usually some mix of what the store operators believe will sell (whatever’s getting the hype or buzz in its respective genre this month; what’s sold well in the recent past) and what they want you to buy (personal favorites; stuff they’ve got too much of this week; stuff they get extra profit margins from).
But on the Web, as you know, the “stock in trade” is limited only by what the operators can special-order from their wholesale suppliers. Web-based music stores can therefore sell any darn thing they want to, to just about anyone who’s got the credit rating.
Web music “malls,” which rent or give away server space to any artist with wares to offer, do away with even minimal “quality control.”
I’ve previously said this is an overall good thing. If properly nourished, this could be a vital part of the demolition of the big-media cartel (or at least a strong challenge to it) and the triumph of what Patti Smith once called “The Age Where Everybody Creates.”
But I also appreciate the great difficulty a band has in getting any attention from the users of an MP3 free-for-all site, where thousands of other bands (many of them quite similar to your own) vie for the same attention, and where free streaming-audio files don’t necessarily spur users to buy whole CDs of a band’s stuff.
Nevertheless, there is some cool/odd/cute stuff on these sites. From time to time, MISCmedia will attempt to find you a few of them. Such as the following (in no particular order):
TOMORROW: New media buys old media, or is it the other way around?
I’M PRETTY SURE you’re all damn sick-N-tired of the millennial hype by now.
So we’ll take a few days off from the whole new-era talk, and instead talk about an era that’s ending today.
When other boys in the mid-’60s were into the likes of Spider-Man, I was collecting Peanuts books.
The Fawcett Crest volumes, to be precise–mass-market paperbacks that arranged four-panel daily strips into full-page layouts, often with additional, anonymous artwork that usually ruined the deceptive simplicity of Charles Schulz’s designs. (Yes, I could realize that as a kid.)
My family didn’t subscribe to a paper that carried the daily strip; so the books, which showed up in supermarket newsracks a year or two after the strips’ original newspaper publication, provided my only access to them.
Eventually, I tracked down the better Peanuts books–the Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston trade paperbacks that stacked two strips per page in proper sequence.
When the papers announced “the first in a series of animated adaptations” of the strip, I was elated. You can imagine my disappointment when I found out the “series” wasn’t going to be a weekly visit with the gang but just occasional specials. The week after A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired in all its depressing glory, I glommed up to the black-and-white Magnavox only to find a regular episode of that mediocre sitcom The Munsters.
A very Charlie Brown-y moment.
Like a lot of smart, unathletic, unpopular boys throughout North America, I identified a lot with Charlie Brown.
He was no dumbed down kid-lit tyke like the Family Circus brood, nor an artificially cheery “lovable loser” like Ziggy or The Born Loser. He was a realistic kid with realistic kid frustrations. He lived in a cookie-cutter suburb like the one growing around our house.
He was lousy at sports, at making friends, at one-upsmanship games–at everything except verbally articulating his troubles; a skill that often just led him into deeper troubles, thanks to “friend” Lucy’s “Psychiatric Help” booth.
His only true friend was a dog whose hyperactive playfulness settled into an elaborate fantasy existence, part of which Charlie Brown was once invited into (the sequence in which Snoopy’s tiny dog house was revealed (verbally but not visually) to be a Doctor Who-like dimensional portal into a vast, art-filled mansion).
Such occasional flights of fancy (a boy known only as “5;” Pig-Pen’s magical ability to become instantly unclean) somehow only enhanced the “realism” of the Peanuts universe.
The strips were often funny and more often poignant, and always maintained sympathy with the characters. They taught an infinite number of lessons in comic pacing, dialogue, and the construction of complex narratives within the discipline of daily four-panel installments.
Bill Melendez’s TV specials and movies (all scripted by Schulz) expanded the visual scope of the strip’s universe without breaking its fundamental laws (except for a few of the later shows, which showed adult human characters on-screen). Vince Gauraldi’s jazz-piano music was gorgeously understated. The casting of real child actors to voice the characters’ elaborate dialogue further cemented Schulz’s central tenet that children really do think and talk this intelligently.
But the tight perfection of Schulz’s draftsmanship (at its peak from about 1965 to 1985) was one aspect of the strip that Melendez’s animators never quite mastered. This was a clue that the strip, unlike most strips from before the days of Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County, would not continue without Schulz.
In 1987, Schulz suddenly abandoned the format of four identically-sized panels per strip. Peanuts went to three taller panels most days; except on days when Schulz chose to divide his space differently. At the time, I wrote that, while it brought a new energy to the strip, it ruined one of its main unspoken themes. The rigid repetition of the same number of frames, all the same size, perfectly matched the ultimately hellish concept of these characters forced to repeat the same life mistakes, to remain the same presexual age for eternity.
Now, they finally get to leave their newsprint prison. Not to enter adult freedoms, but merely to disappear.
AARRGH!
IN OTHER NEWS: Thousands took my heed (or, more likely, got the idea on their own) and gathered all around the closed-off Seattle Center to enjoy a healthy, terrorist-free New Year’s despite mayor Paul Schell’s best efforts to ban them. Schell himself showed up to be interviewed on KOMO, and was very properly met outside the TV station by safe-and-sane jeers and catcalls. Good job, citizens. Next step: A recall election that would be a referendum on the city’s now more official than ever damn-the-non-upscale attitude.
IN OTHER OTHER NEWS: The one company you’d expect to have changed its name by this week still hasn’t, at least as of Sunday night.
TOMORROW: A portent of the digi-future most culture mavens don’t want to talk about–the potential obsolescence of culture mavens.
THE TRADITION CONTINUES: For the 14th consecutive year, here’s your fantastical MISCmedia In/Out List. Thanks to all who contributed suggestions.
As always, this list predicts what will become hot or not-so-hot over the course of the Year of the Double-Oughts; not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you think every person, place, thing, or trend that’s big now will just keep getting bigger forever, I’ve got some Packard Bell PCs to sell you.
(P.S.: Every damned item on this list has a handy weblink. Spend the weekend clicking and having fun.)
INSVILLE
OUTSKI
Jigglypuff
Charizard
Washington Law & Politics
Washington CEO
TrailBlazers
Knicks
‘Amateur’ Net porn
LA porn industry
Game Show Network
USA Network (still)
Casual sex
Casual Fridays
The Nation
The New Republic
Women’s football
Wrestling
Gas masks
Bandanas
Begging
IPOs
Jon Stewart
Jay Leno
Public nudity
“Chastity education”
Global warming
Rolling Stone’s “Hot Issue”
Commuter rail
Anti-transit initiative
Dot-commies (online political organizing)
Dot-coms
Good posture
Implants
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (still)
Greed
Post-Microsoft Seattle
Silicon Valley
Post-WTO Left
Corporate Right
Dalkey Archive Press
HarperCollins
Bust
Bitch
‘Love Your Dog’
‘Kill Your TV’
Artisan Entertainment
Miramax
McSweeney’s
Speak
The Donnas
TLC
Tobey Maguire
Tom Hanks
Spike Jones
Spike Jonze
Michael Moore
Mike Moore
Darren Aronofsky (Pi)
Quentin Tarantino
Finding a Kingdome implosion viewpoint
Finding a New Year’s party spot
Keeping Ken Griffey Jr.
Trading away pitching
Quitting your job
Going on Prozac
Nerdy individuality
Hip conformity
NetSlaves
Business 2.0
Drip
Lattes
Dodi
Dido
Target
Wal-Mart
Amazons
Pensive waifs
Post-corporate economic theory
Dissertations about Madonna
Electric medicine
HMOs
“Girlie” magazines
“Bloke” magazines
Graceland
Last Supper Club
Labor organizing
Hoping for stock options
Yoga
Tae Bo
Urbanizing the suburbs
Gentrifying the cities
The Powerpuff Girls
The Wild Thornberrys
New library
New football stadium
Detroit
Austin
African folk art
Mexican folk art
As the World Turns
Passions
Liquid acid (alas)
Crystal
Dyed male pubic hair
Dreadlocks
Scarification
Piercings
People who think UFOs are real
People who think wrestling’s real
Red Mill
iCon Grill
76
BP/Amoco/Arco and Exxon/Mobil
Rock/dance-music fusion
Retro disco
Peanuts retirement
Garth Brooks retirement
Maximillian Schell
Paul Schell
Breaching dams
Smashing Pumpkins
Smart Car
Sport-utes (now more than ever)
Contact
Dildonics
Orange
Blue
Public accountability
Police brutality
Georgetown
Pioneer Square
Matchless
Godsmack
Buena Vista Social Club soundtrack
Pulp Fiction soundtrack (finally)
Labor/hippie solidarity
‘Cool’ corporations
Performance art
Performance Fleece
Radical politics
‘Radical sports’
Chloe Sevigny
Kate Winslet
International Herald Tribune
Morning Seattle Times
Piroshkies
Wraps
Prague
London
Kozmo.com
Blockbuster (still)
The exchange of ideas
NASDAQ
Fatigues
Khakis
First World Music
Interscope
Gill Sans
Helvetica
Pretending to be Japanese
Pretending to be gangstas
Botany 500
Blink 182
Tanqueray
Jaegermeister
Bremerton
Duvall
Nehi
Surge
Jimmy Corrigan
Dilbert
Cross-cultural coalitions
In-group elitism
Northern Ireland peace plan
Lord of the Dance
Hard bodies
Soft money
Doing your own thing
‘Rebelliously’ doing exactly what Big Business wants
MONDAY: I’m perfectly confident there will still be electricity and computer networks, and am prepared to ring in the double-ought year with a Peanuts tribute.
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?
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–
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–
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–
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–
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.
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.
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.
