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The premise of Soul Train was elevator-pitch simple: an American Bandstand for soul music. A hip but authoritative producer/host. Kids, dressed in the latest teen fashions, dancing in a studio to the latest hits. Two or more in-person guests each show, performing live or lip-syncing.

Anybody in the industry, including Bandstand impresario Dick Clark, could have launched such a show.

But nobody had (on a national level) until Cornelius came along.

Cornelius had been a news reader and backup DJ on Chicago radio, and had hosted teen “record hops” in the area. He started Soul Train on a local Chicago TV station in 1970. The following year, it moved to syndication (and to Hollywood). Within a year from that, it was on in 25 cities.

By 1974, when its theme song “TSOP” became a top 10 hit, it was an institution. It easily buried the rival show Soul Unlimited (Dick Clark’s imitation of Cornelius’s imitation of Bandstand).

For two more decades, the show was the showcase for soul, R&B, and the emerging hiphop and breakdance scenes.

By 1993, rap and its related dance moves had steadily gotten more “hardcore,” far from Cornelius’s personal tastes. He hired a series of replacement hosts while continuing to own and run the show, which aired on fewer stations in more obscure time slots.

Soul Train wound to a close in 2006. Reruns aired for another couple of years. After that, Cornelius sold the rights to an outside company, which has put out DVD sets and a YouTube clip channel. (Cornelius had tried to keep Soul Train performances off the Internet, employing staff to hunt down, and order the deletion of, any such clips.)

In his later years, the man who’d preached prosocial messages to his young audiences was accused of domestic violence by his estranged second wife.

But the legacy of his career shines on.

“And as always in parting, we wish you love, peace, and soul!”

crypt-orchid.blogspot.com

Today marks David Letterman’s 30th anniversary on late night TV.

Appropriately enough, his principal guest last night was Bill Murray, the first guest on both his NBC (1982) and CBS (1993) premieres.

When the NBC Late Night with David Letterman began, it was a breath of fresh air. It was knowing, it was snide, it respected its audience’s intelligence and its love of the bizarre.

The premiere opened with Calvert DeForrest (descendent of radio pioneer Lee DeForrest) reciting a “be very afraid” spiel in front of the Rainbow Room peacock dancers (yes, female “peacocks,” an actual attraction at the rooftop lounge in the RCA (now GE) Building).

Then came the first mini monologue and the first studio comedy bit (a backstage tour). The Murray segment ended with him and the host suddenly leaving the stage, and the screen switching to old film of the 1973 World Series.

That first episode ended with a comedian reciting the opening scene from an obscure Bela Lugosi movie. By the time I saw that bit, I knew I’d be a fan for life.

•

Letterman, the self-spoofing, genre-busting insurgent, is now the establishment, and has been for some time.

A persona that was once hip-to-be-square is now the grand old curmuddgeon. In this respect, he has become more like his onetime occasional foil Harvey Pekar (as seen above).

A collection of shticks that playfully (or awkwardly) toyed with the established celebrity-talk format has become a well-tuned programming machine, that regularly disseminates well-scrubbed guests plugging their films/shows/CDs.

Little comedy bits that had been cute and playful are now trotted out with slick animated openings and pompous fanfares. More of them these days are pre-taped or assembled from news footage, instead of acted out on stage.

The biggest flaw in Letterman’s current formula is the 12:15 a.m. commercial break, following the first guest spot. It runs between five and eight minutes, stopping the whole proceedings. It essentially begs viewers to shut ‘er down and hit the hay.

Still, there are worse fates to befall a creative performer than to become the sort of bigtime mainstream institution he had once scoffed.

Letterman could have grown old much less gracefully.

Like Leno.

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PS: Here are some Letterman guest spots that one entertainment site considers classics. At least one actually is an all-time moment—a totally laugh-free, in-character Andy Kaufman spot from Letterman’s 1980 morning show.

PPS: Letterman began his career on Indianapolis TV in the early 1970s. The ill-fated, Seattle-born actress Frances Farmer ended her career in the same place and time. If I ever meet him, I’ll ask if he’d ever met her.

freecabinporn.com

• This site of nothing but pictures of countryside cabins (rustic to postmodern) reminds me of my young adult years, when all writers were supposed to want to live in cabins. I never did. To me, the countryside was something to escape from.
• On a similar thread, some of the same “writerly lifestyle” folks who’d demanded that I be a mellow back-to-nature lover also kept laundry lists of everything they hated about the modern world. Meet today’s incarnation of that trope, Jonathan Franzen.
• NHL hockey in Seattle: even more likely?
• Here’s something novel for ya: Scenes of women in superhero comics that female readers actually like!
• When a Google attorney goes on a Time Warner site to advocate for less draconian copyright laws, something’s going on. I don’t know exactly what, but something.
• A young Brit couple Tweeted® about their upcoming trip to the States. They said they were gonna “destroy America” by, among other hard-partyin’ things, “digging up Marilyn Monroe’s grave.” Agents arrested ’em on their arrival at LAX, detained ’em, and shipped ’em back home. They insist they were just joking. Memo to Homeland Security: Anyone who actually wants to destroy America probably won’t Tweet® about it.
• If the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation wanted to keep selling itself as the voice of defiant courage, it shouldn’t have caved to the phony right wing smear campaign against Planned Parenthood.
• Don’t watch porn on your laptop in a public library where kids can see it. Make ’em find the really good sites on their own.
• Just why do restaurant websites so consistently suck?

• Clever entrepreneurs in Philadelphia have a line of T-shirts and posters exhorting what I and many of my fellow writers and artists have been shrieking lo these many years to cheapskate dot-com and media execs: FREELANCE AIN’T FREE!
• Good idea in the legislature #1: Looking into the abundance of “special taxing districts” around the state, with an eye toward paring them down.
• Good idea in the legislature #2: Getting rid of a Cold War-era ordinance that authorized state government to persecute, blackball, and ban “subversive” people and groups.
• Let’s all welcome the Houston Astros to the American League West (the Mariners’ division), not this year but next year. Except they might not be called the Astros by then.
• Shepherd Fairey, that “radical chic” Obama and Andre the Giant portraitist, didn’t just steal from AP wire photos. He’s regularly “borrowed” even entire images from sincerely political artists around the world, completely uncredited and uncompensated.
• SeattlePI.com is even more short-staffed than before, but it’s still got some good stuff. Like Vanessa Ho and Joe Dyer’s excellent feature on homeless people sleeping under the Alaskan Way Viaduct, who are being kicked out of there by the state. As Anatole France wrote back in 1894,

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.

• All right, fans of glass buildings and obscure dangerous plants, you all have one year to figure out how to save the Volunteer Park Conservatory.
• Update: That 83 year old activist Tacoma priest, who was on a hunger strike while in federal detention? He’s still detained, but off the hunger strike.
• Another of those silly surveys claims Washington DC has surpassed Seattle as the nation’s “most literate” city.
• A Republican state legislator introduced a bill to scuttle any enforcement of the feds’ prescribed remedies concerning excessive force by Seattle police, and shunt the matter over to “a bipartisan taskforce.” Where, presumably, Republican politicians would hold veto power on any policy changes.
• In other legislative news, farmers and farm workers both back a bill to slow the local spread of “E-Verify,” the federal background-check program for immigrant workers.
• The new Businessweek’s cover story discusses Amazon’s latest move into publishing its own e-books—the opening of an NYC office intended to issue bigtime books by bigtime authors. The headline (“Amazon Wants to Burn the Book Business”) and the cover image (yes, a burning book, straight outta Fahrenheit 451) depict the viewpoint of an NY publishing cartel both scared to pieces and smugly defensive of their old time business-as-usual, now threatened by this dot-com upstart. And just as you’d expect, the piece quotes the industry’s Big Six conglomerate-owned mega-publishers defending their wasteful, slow traditional practices by hyping their “role as nurturers of literary culture.” As if the commercial book biz had ever been about that.

boxx corp.

• A Portland company is about to bring out the “Boxx” scooter, an all-electric two wheel vehicle (30 mph top speed; 40 miles per charge). It’s got a lot of cool sounding features, but its main attribute is its shape. Yes, it looks like you’re driving a really big white smartphone or 4G-era Mac desktop unit. The design is not only spiffy but practical for the company, because it can ship the whole thing via UPS. But how will it look (let alone perform) on the road? You’ll have to guess that part. The company’s website appears to not include a single image of the thing being driven, or even in the same shot as a human. (The thing’s only 40 inches long. Calculate the other dimensions on your own and guess whether your particular rump would fit on it.)
• The “offshoring” of making stuff: Apple’s the current poster child for the practice and its related sins. Before that, Nike and Walmart were. But really, says Larry Dignan at ZDNet, it’s our fault for wanting so much cheap stuff. I disagree. Dignan might live in the upscale bubble of the techie caste, where consumers could choose higher-priced domestic products if more were available. But outside of those rarified circles, too many of us absolutely have to equip our households (and our home offices) as economically as possible (partly due to a lousy domestic economy, which is partly due to all that offshoring).
• Author Honorée Fanonne Jeffers explains why a white person (i.e. Jan Brewer) shoving a finger in the face of a black person (i.e. Obama) is a “teachable moment” in race understanding.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates looks at the latest revelations about Ron Paul’s old newsletter business and concludes Paul might not have actually been a racist, just a cynical exploitive suck-up to racists.
• Eric Boehlert claims at least one or two Republican operatives are dismayed at how the whole party has kowtowed to the Fox “News” Channel’s “radical, fear-based agenda.”
• Meanwhile, Richard Eskow compares the GOP debates to “bad 1950s style science fiction;” specifically as the candidates…

…play their parts in an implausible story of a world that could never exist, acting out nonexistent conflicts while delivering dialog that insults the intelligence. That’s not because they’re stupid. It’s because they think you are.

(from the Tacoma News Tribune):

An item on Page A2 of Wednesday’s paper incorrectly stated that it was singer Etta James’ 74th birthday. James died last week.

• Does David Horsey really believe Newt Gingrich stands a serious chance of becoming president (or rather, that America stands a serious chance of being saddled with such a corrupt egotist getting “the nuclear button”)? Or is he simply being provocative for its own sake?
• Ex-UW public affairs prof Hubert Locke, meanwhile, listens to Gingrich’s debate rants and hears plenty of “racial code words.”
• This is a fairly long and complex story, but the gist appears to be this: Current state GOP boss (and former KVI hate-talk host) Kirby Wilbur set up a Washington branch of the Koch Bros.’ astroturf lobbying group Americans for Prosperity. National AFP HQ helped Wilbur’s guys traipse through a loophole in state laws about partisan political committees, by claiming to instead be a “grassroots” lobbying group, a group that wasn’t really endorsing candidates or policy positions. Even though it ran cleverly-worded stealth attack ads against 13 Democratic legislators, just before the ’10 elections. By deftly skirting around state Public Disclosure Commission guidelines, Washington AFP didn’t have to reveal its money sources. What’s more, it might get to do so in the future, depending on how the state PDC decides to clarify its rules.
• State Attorney General (and GOP gubernatorial candidate) Rob McKenna tries to prove he’s hep with the digital generation by spearheading a crackdown against Facebook “clickjacking” scams.
• With private liquor sales coming to Washington (but only at large retail spaces), here come the out-of-state big-box liquor chains.
• Male and female co-CEOs of a world famous company battle in and out of the courts over full control, leading to a restraining order against one of them. It could be a plot for a potboiler novel or a made-for-TV movie, but probably not for an Archie Comic.
• RealNetworks, the local outfit that pioneered streaming online audio/video, just sold a bunch of patents to Intel for $120 million. In other news, RealNetworks still exists.

delamar apartments (built 1909); from queen anne historical society

• The Seattle Transit Blog would like you to know that, despite our politicians’ continuing paeans to the preservation of the sacred single family neighborhoods, the “majority of housing units in Seattle are multifamily” (apartments, condos, townhomes, et al.).
• In a related trend, more Americans are now single than ever before. Only 51 percent of U.S. adults are married (even with the slow expansion of the right to get married).
• Same sex marriages: At various past times and places, Christians loved ’em.
• A note to all our transit usin’ friends. Check out Metro’s proposed 2012 route changes while you can still give feedback about ’em.
• A cash-strapped state? Not if you listen to the construction lobby.
• Is Amazon out to compete head-on with Netflix?
• An 83-year-old peace-activist priest was sent to a Federal detention center in SeaTac, after he participated in a civil-disobedience action at a nuclear weapons plant site in Tennessee. He’s reportedly being held in solitary confinement, and has been on a hunger strike for two weeks.
• Amy Goodman talks to people who see an “Occupy” influence in Obama’s State of the Union speech.
• But then again, lotsa folk are trying to get a ride on the Occupy ____ bandwagon. Even anti-Semitic fringies, conspiracy-theory propagators, and radical libertarians. You know, the guys who believe business somehow doesn’t have enough power.
• During this age of the incredibly shrinking newspaper, the Washington Post Co.’s main profit center has been the Kaplan “educational publishing” operation. That company’s bought a chain of for-profit colleges, now collectively known as Kaplan University. The Post Co.’s CEO has admitted, in now-revealed documents, that Kaplan U. used federal student loan funds and “predatory accounting” to jack up tuition costs to poor students.

• The City of Seattle and the Port of Seattle are getting together to publicize local music at Sea-Tac airport. The campaign will involve piped-in music and in-terminal announcements read by local music stars, plus videos, still images projected on screens, and a local music feed on the airport’s WiFi network. There’s an opening party with four live bands on Saturday. That’s all nice, but what would really make it rock would be Maktub covering Brian Eno’s Music for Airports!
• In the ashes of Masins Furniture’s departure from Pioneer Square and the loss of the nearby 619 Western art studios, ambitious developers say they want to turn two of the three adjoining Masins buildings into “PiSquare Arts,” a complex of work and live/work spaces. The developers vow to make the units “as affordable and artist friendly as we can.” Can any non-subsidized remodel create actual artist spaces, not just architectural offices falsely billed as “artist spaces”? We shall see.
• Who doesn’t like the state’s apparently about-to-pass gay marriage bill? Catholic leaders. Who doesn’t like the Catholic leaders’ dislike? Catholic laypeople.
• Some wags are snickering at Michelle Obama’s current Reader’s Digest cover. They claim she’s making a hand gesture that looks like the American Sign Language image for a certain body part. Of course, she could just be giving a shout-out to her brother, who coaches a certain college basketball team with a certain team name.

Here’s the start of another irregular feature on this site, which will probably sputter off and fade away like so many other shticks here.

It’s about how “radical politics” devolved into a lifestyle niche long ago, and how it’s become virtually useless as a vehicle for actual change in North American society.

Today’s course material is a blog post at Huffington Post, by Occupy Seattle advocate Mark Taylor-Canfield.

It was about the local protest against the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” ruling, which one year ago loosened most restrictions against big-money campaign spending by corporate lobbyist outfits.

This protest had been scheduled for last Friday, but was postponed to the following day, due to the continuing extreme weather conditons.

But Taylor-Canfield’s headline is not about the protest itself, or the cause it espoused. It’s “News Blackout Greets Citizens United Protest in Seattle.”

That is NOT the most important aspect of the events being discussed here.

The headline and lead of this piece should not be about what corporate media did or did not mention. It should be about the event ITSELF.

And if you’re the first person to spread the word about it, you can hype that fact up with “Exclusive Scoop Big News You Heard It Here First!” language.

But if your intent is to proclaim alternatives to corporate society, your first priority should not be what corporate society thinks of you.

Besides, if you know anything at all about the dreaded “mainstream media” these days, you know they’re mightily understaffed these days. Especially on the local level, and especially on weekends. If they don’t get around to you, it’s not necessarily an act of overt conspiracy to silence you.

This particular weekend, there were still weather-aftermath stories to cover, which used most of what few people the Seattle Times and the radio/TV stations had in the field that day.

(Many of these sources had mentioned the original protest date’s postponement, even though they didn’t send anybody to the protest when it did occur.)

Besides, anti-corporate movements should neither rely on corporate publicity nor find it “newsworthy” when corporate publicity does not appear.

Especially in the Net era, ya gotta be making your own cultural infrastructure.

from three sheets northwest

• Well, whaddya know? Looks like gay marriage will pass the state Senate! (It’s always been expected to pass the state House.)
• Historic-preservation bad news #1: The Kalakala, currently docked in Tacoma, started listing to one side during Friday’s wind storm. The Army Corps of Engineers stepped in to prevent the legendary streamined ferry boat from sinking. Its current owner can’t afford to restore it, perhaps not even to fix it. The owner of the dock where it’s moored wants it out. It’s been offered for sale for as little as $1. If no repair plan, new owner, and/or new dock site emerge, the Corps of Engineers could seize and dismantle it.
• Historic-preservation bad news #2: Lawrence Kreisman from Historic Seattle blasts Sound Transit, because he agency plans to demolish the Standard Records storefront on NE 65th Street, as part of its Roosevelt light-rail station project. But few people seem to care that the same project would obliterate the original QFC store.
• Bellevue’s own Redbox is now the biggest video rental company in the nation (if you count physical discs, not streams or downloads).
• “Distressed homes.” That’s the term for sales of foreclosed homes, and for “short sales” of homes for less than what’s owed on them. They’re one-third of home sales in King County these days, and half of home sales in Pierce and Snohomish counties.
• State Rep. Reuven Carlyle is the latest to express his disgust at draconian all-cuts state budgets and the “tyranny of the minority” behind them.…
• …while Knute Berger ponders whether the reluctance to admit the need for public services, and for a reformed tax system to support them, is a sign that the social fabric of our city, state, and nation could be collapsing from within.
• The next bowling alley scheduled for demolition: Robin Hood Lanes in Edmonds, a fine place at which I have bowled (pathetically, as I always do).
• You know the sorry state of newspapers and big consumer magazines. But do you know what other print genre is “staggering along” on “geriatric legs”? Manga. For one thing, the biggest U.S. outlet for translated Japanese comic magazines and graphic novels (as much as one-third of total sales) was the now-imploded Borders Books. And the Japanese home-country market for the stuff is also shrinking and aging, partly due to Japan’s declining birth rate. (Thanx and a hat tip to Robert Boyd for the link.)
• Post-SOPA item #1: Could the Internet censorship dust-up drive a wedge between Democrats and one of the few big industries (entertainment) that mostly donates to Democratic campaigns?
• Post-SOPA item #2: Even in Denmark, the copyright industry loves to disguise its proposed Internet censorship laws as “crackdowns against child pornography.”
• Post-SOPA item #3: The MegaUpload bust has led several other file sharing sites to refuse access from U.S. users, or to restrict downloads of files to the same users who’d uploaded them. But would a complete end to noncommercial piracy really lead everybody into attaining all the same content commercially? Not bloody likely.
• Why are most computers, smartphones, HDTVs, etc. made in China and not here? It’s not really labor costs, not anymore. It’s China’s hyper-efficient supply chain, its masses of skilled engineers, and its sheer scale of industrial intrastructure. Oh, and perhaps the little fact that American workers “won’t be treated like zoo animals.” (The first-linked story is about Apple, but applies to most all consumer-electronics firms.)
• Attention, Coast to Coast A.M. listeners and techno-libertarians: Folks like me aren’t down on Ron Paul because we’re scared of his awesome disruptive super-goodness. We’re down on him because we despise his “small government” hypocrisy—the freedom to discriminate, the freedom to pollute, the freedom to pay slave wages, but no reproductive rights, no gay marriage, and no legal protections for “the little guy.” That, and the racist newsletters and his lame cop-out excuses for them.
• Two great tastes that absolutely don’t taste great together—Mickey Mouse and Joy Division. (Really.)

Ex P-I sportswriters Art Thiel and Steve Rudman started SportsPress Northwest a little over a year ago. It boasted a professional, fully staffed sports reporting team.

Since then, the realities of ad-dependent content sites have dug in.

From an initial slate of nine writers, the site now lists only Thiel, Rudman, and local sports historian Dave Eskenazi.

Game summaries are taken from KING-TV, in a reciprocal linking arrangement.

It’s not Thiel and Rudman’s fault; SportsPress’s content was top-quality from the start.

It’s the web-content business model (not so much “broken” as never properly “built” in the first place).

Most cable TV customers in Seattle have to deal with the industry colossus Comcast.

But there’s a second cable provider in town. It covers the neighborhoods Comcast’s various predecessor companies (Viacom, TelePrompTer, AT&T Cable, Group W) chose not to wire up.

This other cable company has variously been known, under various mergers and buyouts, as Seanet, Summit, Millennium, and Broadstripe.

Under all those regimes, it seldom kept up with the services and channel lineups offered by the bigger boys.

But this might finally change.

Broadstripe’s Washington and Oregon operations were bought by a Kirkland firm, Wave Broadband.

It may take a few months, but Wave promises to upgrade these newly acquired systems.

And from the channel lineups on Wave’s existing systems, this upgrade could be substantial.

I’m talking HD versions of some of my fave channels (CBC, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, MSNBC, CNN, AMC, TCM, HBO, NBC Sports Network (formerly Versus, formerly Outdoor Life Network)).

And channels I want but Broadstripe doesn’t carry (IFC, Current, Ovation, Boomerang, CSPAN2, MLB Network, HDNet).

Still no Sundance Channel, though.