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….

I WAS ASKED by the editors of Resonance to participate in their year-end issue’s survey of various critics’ musical “guilty pleasures” of the past decade.

Being the shameless guy I am, I replied that there was nothing I’ve liked over the past 10 years that I particularly felt guilty about.

Nevertheless, I was able to provide the magazine with a few choice discs that other critics might wish me to feel guilty about liking. The mag declined to include any of them on its final list, which turned out to specialize in discs that had received both commercial popularity and critical disdain.

(Some of these following discs I’ve mentioned in prior articles on this site.)

• SAM SPENCE The Power and the Glory: Original Music and Voices of NFL Films (Tommy Boy)

  American football is a patiently-paced game of pre-choreographed plays, executed by players whose faces you can’t see. NFL Films turns this into narratives of personal heroism, and these stirringly-cliched themes are a big part of that transformative process.

• VARIOUS ARTISTS Music for TV Dinners, Vols. 1 and 2 (Scamp/Caroline)

  Fifties and Sixties leftovers from a stock-music library, which had lent them out for everything from commercials and educational films to ‘Ren & Stimpy’ and Russ Meyer movies.

• VARIOUS ARTISTS South End All Stars (Collective Fruit)

  One day, when the true obscurities of “Seattle Scene”-era music are fully appreciated by rarities collectors, this compilation will find its due. The band names alone will be worth the eBay auction price (Rhino Humpers, Tramps of Panic, Spontaneous Funk Whorehouse, Queer the Pitch, Stir the Possum)!

• CHURN Titus (Laundry Room)

  More relics from the early “We’re Notgrunge, Dammit!” era of local indie bands (late ’93). Still sounds grungier than most of the fake-grunge bands from L.A. and London the major labels were hyping at the time.

• EDWYN COLLINS I’m Not Following You (Setanta)

  Pleasant, insubstantial, Birthday Party-esque twee pop and pseudo-neo-disco.

• RICHARD PETERSON Love on the Golf Course (PopLlama)

  Easy-listening music with a true hard edge (not a posed “atittude”), by a lifetime street musician expressing his fantasies of a leisurely life he’s thus far never gotten to live.

• BLACK VELVET FLAG Come Recline (Go Kart)

  Lounge arrangements of punk classics–a surefire formula for good times! I’ve done it myself. Try it in your own home.

• PSYCLONE RANGERS The Devil May Care (World Domination)

  Loud, stoopid, un-self-conscious, fun garage-punk from Pennsylvania. So the songs all sound the same; so what?

• VARIOUS ARTISTS Planet Squeezebox (Ellipsis Arts box set)

  The mighty accordion and its variants, as heard on three continents–proof that so-called “world music” need not be laid back or mellow.

• KALYANJI, ANANDJI Bombay the Hard Way (Motel)

  India movie music–proof that so-called “world music” need not be folksome or less than ruthlessly commercial. If there’s a “guilty” part to this pleasure, it’s in the unnecessarily campy new song titles and the dance-floor-friendly remixing added to the tracks in this collection.

IN OTHER NEWS: It’s a sad day for fans of Happy Kyne and the Mirth Makers.

TOMORROW: An “off-off-year” election brings leftish “progressives” and rightish “populists” against a common foe, the corporate middle-of-the-road.

ELSEWHERE:

• Life’s not a movie, so why so much background music? (Hey, if life were a movie, I’d demand a stunt double….)
• This site imitates chicken restaurants right….

SHOULD’VE DONE IT YEARS AGO, I know, but the prospect of expiring dental insurance finally got me to getting my last three wisdom teeth out, in one big operation.

Because the lower two were impacted (not only stuck beneath the gums but down there sideways), it was a big-deal surgery, with full anesthetic and prescription painkillers (just ultra-strength Motrin, not anything narcotic–don’t even ask me to sell you any leftover pills), and a long at-home rehab.

Fortunately, I live in the age of cyber-capitalism and media saturation, so being groggy and alone at home all day wasn’t that much of a bother. Not with the modern conveniences available today.

Modern convenience #1: Kozmo.com. Begun in NYC last year and now operating in four cities, Kozmo (yes, the name’s a variant on Seinfeld’s Cosmo Kramer) delivers video rentals, snack foods, and a small selection of books and CDs. And it’s actually them doing the delivering, not some overnight service. That means in the approximate time-frame of a pizza delivery, you can start viewing any of 16,000 flicks. (Not enough of my favorite obscurities and cult-classics, but a serviceable-enough list.)

Modern convenience #2: CBC Television. My cable company finally brought the Canadian channel back, so once again view its unique public-broadcasting-with-commercials mix. In many ways it’s what PBS could’ve been if it ever had the nerve–investigative news-magazine shows, family dramas, un-cloying family dramas, late-night nudie “art” movies, sharp political satire, newscasts that actually cover foreign non-earthquake stories, great sports (currently: lotsa hockey; coming in January: curling!), and the venerable British soap Coronation Street!

Modern convenience #3: Home Grocer. They only deliver the day following your online order, but you don’t have to leave the house to be supplied with your post-oral-surgery dietary needs (diet shakes, yogurt, Gatorade, applesauce, cocoa, et al.).

Modern convenience #4: Modern oral-surgery technique. I went in and was promptly strapped to the operating chair, given the anesthetic gas and then a knockout shot. An hour later I was gently aroused and led, groggy, onto a day bed in a darkened “recovery room.” A half-hour after that, a friend led me downstairs to a waiting taxi. Except for three new mouth holes and an achy jaw, I was sufficiently clear-headed to resume working for at least a few hours the following day.

Old-fashioned inconvenience #1: Dry sockets. A surgical complication I was led to believe only smokers had to worry about. Instead, pieces of my first post-surgical meal (soft French fries with the skin on) got stuck deep in the gum folds of both lower extraction sites, beyond the reach of any salt-water rinse or Listerine, preventing the blood clot needed for wound-healing.

The result: Five days of excruciating pain, starting two days after the operation. Pain ultimately unrelievable by the pills prescribed to me or by any other legal substances (and I didn’t use any illegal ones). Pain that prevented sleep and caused near-hallucinatory states. All that, plus two bouts of nausea, before I could get back to the surgeon for a medicinal-gauze implant.

But walking to the Medical-Dental Building for the second appointment, I had to pass the Bon Marche’s breast-cancer-awareness window displays, and remembered my mother’s recent bout with the disease (she’s doing very well now, thank you).

It put my own non-life-threatening suffering into perspective.

TOMORROW: Could The Blair Witch Project be considered a Dogme 95 movie?

ELSEWHERE:

• How many fake-Nike logos do you see in a typical day? (found by Peterme….)
• “All beers available in refillable deposit bottles are automatically eligible” to be listed on the Cheap Beer Server….
• How to learn what your husband’s really been up to….

TO OUR LOCAL READERS: You’ve still one week to see the Pacific Science Center’s traveling exhibit honoring the career of Japanese cartoon pioneer Osamu Tezuka.

The exhibit (organized by the official Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum in Japan) is a small one, but it’s packed with power, pathos, and inspiration–just like Tezuka’s most enduring character, the flying child-robot hero Mighty Atom, a.k.a. Astro Boy.

The exhibit consists of four video screens, a couple dozen panel displays, and a giant Astro Boy balloon figure “flying” on the ceiling. The panels chronicle Tezuka’s best known print and TV cartoon series through original cels and comic-book art. The video monitors play prime examples, not only of Tezuka’s own works but of the Japanese animation industry before and after his influence took hold.

A trained M.D. and a devout post-WWII pacifist, Tezuka (1928-89) brought a sense of morality and beauty to his work. His stories were “educational” without being preachy, because he used childlike characters such as Astro and Kimba the White Lion (the all-but-official inspiration for The Lion King to teach the kids about the complexities of life and of caring for one’s fellow creatures.

If Tezuka was a prime example of postwar Japanese antimilitarism, he was also a prime example of postwar Japanese capitalism. He had several serials running in different children’s magazines simultaneously, keeping the reprint and character-licensing rights.

The exhibit claims he produced 150,000 comic-book pages over his 41-year career. That averages out to almost 75 pages a week, a figure almost impossible without a cadre of assistants.

But he didn’t just produce quantity. He added many “cinematic” visual techniques and complex storylines (some of which stretched out over years) to what had been a formulaic manga scene.

Some critics might argue that manga’s still a formulaic scene; but Tezuka added many more ingredients to the formula. His influence brought a popularity (and an adult audience) to comics in Japan that the medium still has to fight for here.

These advances in technique worked to prepare Tezuka’s team for moving beyond elaborate-but-still drawings into primitive animation. Starting in 1961 (Astro Boy was Japan’s first TV cartoon series), he adapted many of his works for the small screen, produced by his own studio using, and expanding upon, Hanna-Barbera’s newly-established time-and-money-saving techniques (collectively known as “limited animation”).

Having already worked for over a decade at making print comics seem “cinematic,” Tezuka and his team were able to create stirring adventure stories and likeable characters on paltry early-TV budgets.

And as the boss of his own studio, animating characters already well-known in print form, Tezuka held a degree of both creative and business control U.S. TV animation has almost never seen, then or now. He used that authority to “smarten up” his shows with complex storylines, involving characters audiences could identify with.

Today, Tezuka is revered in his homeland and among the global manga/anime cult as “the God of Anime.” A review of the exhibit bore an unfortunately misleading headline, which may have sent kids in expecting to see Pokemon characters. Tezuka didn’t create Pokemon; he merely established the story structure, drawing style, and aesthetic tone which Pokemon, and dozens of other Japanese print, TV, and theatrical cartoon products have followed, to varying degrees of success.

If there’s a note-O-irony in this story, it’s that Tezuka, who regularly placed environmental messages into his stories, almost singlehandedly created an industry that destroys old-growth forests throught Asia (and imports whole logs from the U.S. Northwest) to make millions of throwaway, phone-book-sized manga magazines every week.

TOMORROW: Top candy picks for this Halloween.

ELSEWHERE:

• “No fat guy would ever dream of making a move on a girl without first feeding her a nice meal….”
• Bread that’s way past its pull date….
• Who could possibly be against tributes to motherhood?…

JUST OVER A WEEK AGO, I attended a reception for a specially-commissioned set of works by ten top contemporary artists.

All the artists had to start with the same object and paint or otherwise decorate it to their tastes.

The objects of beauty: Five-foot-tall fiberglass coffee mugs.

It was a promo piece for Millstone Coffee, the Everett, WA-founded, value-priced, supermarket gourmet-coffee operation that was bought a couple years back by none other than Procter & Gamble, the conglomerate ruthlessly fictionalized in Richard Powers’s novel Gain.

P&G’s been running national TV spots touting Millstone as the real coffee lover’s alternative to “that leading specialty-coffee chain,” alleging that other company’s more interested in selling T-shirts (i.e., promoting its brand name) than in serving up the finest quality java.

That’s a mighty allegation to be made by P&G, which practically invented brand-name marketing early in this century.

But anyhoo, they’re trying to emphasize that real-coffee-lovers image by test marketing a line of even gourmet-er beans, “Millstone Exotics.” That’s where the artists came in.

They include several whose work I’ve followed for some time–Parris Broderick, Meghan Trainor, and Shawn Wolfe.

Their colorfully-decorated big mugs, to be trucked around to public outdoor viewing spaces in the cities where Millstone Exotics will initially be marketed (Seattle, Portland, and Spokane), were meant by the company to convey a new image for the new higher-end product line; as something even fancy-schmancier than the stuff found in the coffee-store chains.

(Even though Millstone is now made at P&G’s existing coffee plants as well as its original Everett facility, and is shipped to supermarkets by the same distribution infrastructure that brings you Tide, Tampax, Iams pet foods, and diet snacks made with Olestra.)

Anyhoo (again), the artists at the reception expressed no public qualms about the project (many have done commercially-commissioned work before); not even for a company traditionally known for less than avant-garde cultural visions. And, goodness knows, in today’s art climate they could certainly use the income.

I have just one beef about the project. Because the giant cups were devised for outdoor display during the winter, they were molded with sealed tops. They can’t be reused (without a lot of hacksawing) as something an exotic dancer could jump out from.

Not even for the old “Won’t you join me in a cup of coffee?” gag.

IN OTHER NEWS: Some background reading about the fashion industry’s “friends” in Saipan.

TOMORROW: Another possible way to restore contemporary art’s place in urban society.

ELSEWHERE:

• At Retro Future, you can learn all about the wonderful 21st Century we’ll probably never get (found by Illuminatrix)….
• A few toys today’s parents may remember….
• What? A “Best Writers of the Century” list that doesn’t even include Sidney Sheldon? I demand a recount!…

AS IT APPARENTLY MUST to all local non-news TV shows in the U.S. these days, death came this summer to Almost Live, for 15 years an only-in-Seattle institution. (OK it was syndicated in two nonconsecutive years, and the national kiddie show Bill Nye the Science Guy was essentially an AL spinoff, but you get the idea.) The last AL reruns may have left the familiar Saturday time slot by the time you read this, with only occasional specials to be commissioned by KING-TV (the first is this Saturday). The cast members made an appearance earlier this month on their longtime spoof-target, KOMO’s Northwest Afternoon, during which they congratulated NWA for not having been cancelled yet.)

Theoretically, the cast (or however many members of it would be willing) could go to work for another station. But since none of those other stations seem any more interested in local entertainment fare than KING was (although Fox affilliate KCPQ’s reportedly pondering a morning show), that seems unlikely.

Call me overly optimistic, but I used to believe the increasing bevy of broadcast and cable channels would mean more opportunities for different kinds of shows–even shows that seamlessly mixed droll, low-key humor, broad sketch comedy, and cheap-shot jokes about local politicians.

Sure, a week’s episode might contain its share of groaners and easy gags. (The series almost never used writers beyond the eight cast members, two of whom also doubled as producer and director.)

But even in its weaker moments, AL had a pulse and a look all its own. And it exemplified a particularly Nor’Wester flavor of off-center humor. You could find traces of this in the writings of Lynda Barry (an old pal of AL host John Keister); the biting TV and print works of Matt Groening (an old pal of Barry); the cartoons of Jim Woodring, Gary Larson, Ellen Forney, et al.; the sardonic song lyrics of Scott McCaughey and Chris Ballew; and such former area-TV staples as Stan Boreson, J.P. Patches, and Spud Goodman.

Could anything like it appear again? Well, maybe.

Late last month, I got into a well-publicized preview screening for Doomed Planet, a shot-on-video movie directed by Alex Mayer and written by George Clark (who previously had created two issues of a Stranger parody tabloid, only to find most of their readers thought the Stranger staff had parodied itself).

Within a loose plotline involving two warring religious cults (a cult of sex-happy hippies vs. a cult of Armageddon-predicting Goths), the videomakers weaved in quite a bit of AL-esque bits, from genre-movie minispoofs to local popcult references (a fictionalized version of Mary Kay LeTourneau makes a brief appearance) to an atmosphere of knowing, late-century-cynical neo-burlesque.

While Doomed Planet, at least in the cut shown at the screening, is a much more rough-hewn work than Almost Live ever was (some of Mayer’s large, unpaid cast didn’t really know about comic timing, and much of the sound was muddied), it’s nice to know the no-budget, no-hype, no-pretensions NW comic spirit lives on.

IN OTHER NEWS: Another sign of hope for regionalism within the global-media landscape is Turner South, a new entertainment-and-sports cable channel to be offered only to cable systems in the southeastern states. I’d love an attempt at something like that up here; even though a NW entertainment channel would have fewer pre-existing movies and rerun series to prop up its schedule than a Southern channel would.

TOMORROW: That new alternative-art patron, Procter & Gamble.

ELSEWHERE:

• A writing instructor insists, “It’s our duty to be explicit, to allow our characters good wholesome sex….”
• Aside from the irony of a “health food” company eventually ending up making Pop-Tarts, this scholarly essay provides a necessary reminder of the link between supposedly “healthy” diets and sexual fears. Both ultimately express a desire for a tidier, more rational life than our biological forms really need….
• “Ninety-nine plastic bottles of beer on the wall….” (found by Julienne)

CORPORATE-MEDIA REACTIONS TO THE INTERNET have come in waves. The “Threat To Our Children” wave. The “Threat To Common Discourse” wave. The “E-Commerce” wave.

(Funny, I always thought “E-Commerce” was what happened in the parking lots outside rave dances.)

Now, there’s another wave, and it’s something corporate media absolutely luuvvv, at least in principle.

The Net, according to the newest Received Idea, is indeed good for one thing.

Selling movie tickets.

By now, even people who haven’t seen The Blair Witch Project are totally familiar with the film, its plot, its premise, and, most prominently of all, the hype. The simultaneous Time and Newsweek cover stories. The cast’s appearance on the MTV Video Music Awards. The endless repetition, from Entertainment Weekly to the New York Observer, of the filmmakers’ success-story legend–how a next-to-no-budget indie horror film became a huge hit thanks to “word of mouth” publicity on the Net.

A more careful look at the story, though, reveals something much less “spontaneous” yet simultaneously more interesting to corporate-media types.

Blair Witch turns out to have been a marriage made in marketing heaven, a three-way match between the economics/aesthetics of ’90s Fringe-Indie filmmaking, the Net’s genre-film fan base, and good old-fashioned B-movie hucksterism.

From the indie-film craze, the Blair Witch filmmakers got a whole language of “looks” and shticks: College-age, unknown actors; wobbly camera work (some shot on video); the gimmicks of fake-documentary shooting and characters talking into the camera; and other assorted means of turning a lack of production resources into a feeling of immediacy and a sort of realism.

From the scifi/horror fan community online, distributors Artisan Entertainment found a ready-made audience, with highly articulated opinions on what it liked and disliked in genre movies (a marketer’s wet dream!). Artisan could fashion a campaign promising everything real fans wanted, while making the film’s cheapness into an asset.

From the exploitation tradition, Artisan learned the importance of spending more money selling the movie than the filmmakers had spent making it. The studio put up a big website (that never mentioned the story’s fictional), slipped preview tapes and screening passes to influential online reviewers, planted preview stories in “alternative” papers, and generally sucked up to a fan community used to being treated as an afterthought by the big studios.

The result: A return-on-investment Roger Corman probably never even dreamed of.

But what happens when a movie gets the fan-site treatment, the newsgroup recommendations, and the chat room praise, but without the distributor’s puppet-strings directly or indirectly manipulating it all?

You get The Iron Giant.

A movie described by gushing fans as representing everything from the first successful U.S.-made adaptation of Japanese adventure-anime conventions to the potential harbinger of a new era in animated features. A movie praised and re-praised on darn near every weblog site and online filmzine as a refreshingly serious, grownup animated film.

But after the box-office nonsuccess of Space Jam, Quest for Camelot, and The King and I, Warner Bros. seems to have little remaining faith in its feature-animation unit.

The Iron Giant was released in the dog days of August, with nominal TV advertising (chiefly on the Kids WB cartoon shows), almost no merchandising tie-ins (even at the Warner Studio Store), and a nice-looking yet perfunctory website.

What’s probably singlehandedly kept the film in the theatres for seven weeks (at least in some parts of the country) has been the Net word-O-mouth. Real word-O-mouth, with little or no studio push or even studio attention.

The Iron Giant cost a lot more to make than The Blair Witch Project, so it won’t be easy to compare the effectiveness of each film’s free online fan publicity.

But it’s clear which one’s the real netfan-championed underdog, for whatever that’s worth.