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The great decimation of one of America’s greatest art forms continues, with the sudden cancellation of both All My Children and One Life to Live.
As noted by Knute Berger, whose aunt was one of the genre’s most venerable actors, these programs seemed to come from another time, another place, another world. They had an eternal, ethereal sense about them, even when they were trying (usually badly) to be young and hip.
It was Agnes Nixon’s (creator of both AMC and OLTL) careful juxtaposition of the universal and the with-it (by suburban standards) that made AMC, in particular, the darling of the young ladies of my teen and college years. It was the reason there are so many women in their 30s these days sporting the names “Erica” and “Tara” (the female corners of the show’s original love-rectangle storyline).
Around this time, there was also a Seattle tie-in to AMC. It seemed to be the place characters kept moving to whenever the producers wanted to drop somebody without killing them off. In the 1990s, two real local businesses were named after fictional businesses on the show—Cortland Computer (in Pine Valley, Palmer Cortland’s high-tech empire; in Seattle, an early ISP) and GlamORama (in PV, Opal’s hair salon; in Seattle, a funky fashion and novelty-gift boutique).
As I’ve written here previously, there’s no more real business model for these shows. Even as more people are working from home (or not working), the archtype of the stay-home mom having “her stories” on during housework has been passé for so long it’s not even retro anymore. In a cable/internet world, scripted drama episodes meant to be seen only once are simply not cost-effective. (ABC previously announced it’s dumping its SoapNet cable channel.)
Domestic drama stories can be told in any medium or format. But the particular qualities of the serials—multiple storylines, no single lead character, no single climactic moment, no ending, no season breaks—those assets belong to the soaps and a very few other genres (mainly certain comic strips and comic books). It’s perfectly possible to have open ended storytelling in Net video “webisodes,” but they’d pretty much need commercial backing of some sort. (Indie productions usually can’t offer long-term contracts to a dozen or more actors.)
Will a savvy marketer try this?
Tune in tomorrow.
“E-book Sales Explode in February.”
Dead-tree book sales? Ehhh….
Some time within the next few days, something by me should be up at Crosscut.com. As you may recall, that’s the nonprofit local news n’ punditry site started by original Seattle Weekly publisher David Brewster. I’ll let you know when.
The Totem House fish n’ chips stand near the Ballard locks is SAVED!
Red Mill Burgers will open at the site later this year. The location will offer fish and chowder as well as Red Mill’s regular gourmet-burger menu.
It was originally built in the mid 1930s, as a gift shop selling Native American artifacts to locks visitors. It closed in WWII. It reopened in 1945 as a fish stand. The same family owned it for 65 years of gradual decline, until they abruptly shuttered it this past New Year’s.
Mayor Mike McGinn is one of the civic leaders who’ve submitted short essays to Dan Bertolet’s new CityTank.org, on the topic of celebrating urban life.
McGinn’s piece is a photo essay (merely excerpted below) that reads like a manifesto:
Sarah Palin and other figures on the right like to talk about “small town values†as being “the real America.†We know better. These are our values: We have great urban places, where people can live and shop in the same building. And we protect them. Seattleites create and use urban spaces – their way. From the bottom up. We take care of each other – and we feed each other. We’re not scared of new ideas. We think idealism is a virtue. We play like it matters, because it does. We stand up for each other. We share our cultures with each other. And the music, the art, the food…is astounding. We love race and social justice. We expect our youth to achieve. President Barack Obama called on America to win the future. Mr. President, the people of Seattle are ready.
Sarah Palin and other figures on the right like to talk about “small town values†as being “the real America.†We know better. These are our values:
President Barack Obama called on America to win the future. Mr. President, the people of Seattle are ready.
Since I believe one good manifesto deserves another, I hereby offer my own:
David Guterson and other figures on Bainbridge Island like to talk about the countryside as being the only real place to live. We know better. These are our values: We value diverse workplaces and gatherings. Upscale white men alongside upscale white women—and even upscale white gays. Yet we also admire African Americans; preferably if they are both musical and dead. We champion the institution of public education, as long as our own kids can get into a private school. We celebrate people’s expressions of sexuality, provided they’re not too, you know, sexual. We strive toward progressive, inclusive laws and policies except when they would inconvenience business. We take pride in our urban identity, as we build more huge edifices and monuments to desperately prove how world class we are. We support the arts, particularly when that support doesn’t stick us in the same room with unkempt artists. We value regional planning and cooperation, even with those mouth-breathing hicks out there. We protect and enhance the environment, particularly those environments we drive 40 miles or more to hike in. We love a strong, vital music scene that’s in someone else’s neighborhood. We appreciate our heritage. We moan about how everything in this town sucks; then, years later, we claim it was great back then but all sucks now. We value a strong, independent news media, regularly alerting us to the city’s 103 Best Podiatrists. We admire innovation and original ideas, especially if they’re just like something from New York or San Francisco. We support locally-based businesses until they get too big. President Barack Obama has advocated “the fierce urgency of now.” Mr. President, the people of Seattle will get around to it once they’ve finished playing Halo: Reach.
David Guterson and other figures on Bainbridge Island like to talk about the countryside as being the only real place to live. We know better. These are our values:
President Barack Obama has advocated “the fierce urgency of now.” Mr. President, the people of Seattle will get around to it once they’ve finished playing Halo: Reach.
According to my iTunes directory, you’re…
Joseph Stiglitz, writing in Vanity Fair, is hardly the only commentator to notice how modern America’s grossly disproportionate concentration of wealth by the richest 1 percent is bad for the nation, and the world, as a whole.
Stiglitz’s addition to this argument is his observation that the richest’s pigginess isn’t good for the richest either. America’s (and the “industrialized” world’s) prosperity is a direct result of publicly-funded infrastructure, from roads and shipping lanes to the now embattled “social safety net.”
Then there’s the simple matter of having a middle class with enough disposable wealth to buy the stuff the rich people’s companies sell.
If all those are in tatters, Stiglitz asserts, the basis of the richest’s own prosperity is endangered.
His solution, like a lot of “solutions” offered in essays such as this, is vague. But it’s centered on the need to finally pay attention to the needs of the less than filthy rich.
In other words, those who aren’t the targets of Vanity Fair’s advertisers.
Stiglitz and his editors at VF have achieved an impressive rhetorical feat.
They’ve framed an anti-elitist argument in a manner compatible with the mission of an elitist publication.
It’s not the first time this has happened, however.
A few years back, a freelance writer whose name I unfortunately forget told of submitting a story proposal about hunger in America to the NY Times Sunday magazine. Its editors wrote back to him asking him to make it “more upscale.”
A lot of our allegedly “liberal” media institutions are so exclusively aimed at “the target demographic” (i.e., the upper-upper middle class and above), they have nothing to say to, or about, today’s epidemic of downward mobility.
That’s even the case of so-called “alternative” media outlets. If you’re not likely to hang out in hip bars or wear the coolest new styles or consume either gourmet burgers or wheat-germ smoothies, they’d rather not have you mussing up their audience metrics.
The building of a true populist socio-political movement will have to address all this (and, of course, much more).
Joanna White at (the formerly locally based) Slate.com sees Charlie Sheen’s public meltdown (which I still believe he’d at least partly contrived, as a stunt to get out of his TV contract) as a sign of hope.
White wishes “mean sitcoms” with their insult gags and mutual-deprecation-society casts would go away. She would like the probable end of Two and a Half Men to portend the whole sub-genre’s oblivion.
I’m not so sure it’ll happen.
There’s at least one cable half-channel (Adult Swim) whose “humor” is built entirely around inhumanity. Perhipheral characters suffer and die violent deaths, and the main characters shrug it off with a quickie one-liner.
And since even cheapo Flash-based animation has a long production lead time, even a sudden sea change in the public ethos won’t end those shows very soon. Though it could render them fatally unhip.
UPDATE #1: Matt Zoller Seitz at Salon.com suggests a reason for all the current TV series centered around the celebration of aggressive, obnoxious, middle-aged, alpha-male “heroes.” Seitz sez it’s because that’s the psychological profile of all the studio and network bosses in charge of greenlighting the shows, the guys to whom the shows’ creators and producers must suck up.
UPDATE #2: In Stephen Battaglio’s excellent biography David Susskind: A Televised Life, producer Leonard Stern (Susskind’s associate on Get Smart! and He & She, and coincidentally also the creator of the Mad Libs books) is quoted as saying pro-social comedy’s a lot harder to write than insult comedy:
A comedy based on love—and I really believe this one [He & She] was—is harder to sell and harder to sustain…. Why? I don’t know. But comedy writers generally can do deprecating humor much more readily and easily than they can humor that is loving and caring.
At 2 a.m. this morning, I finished a book project that won’t earn me a cent for at least six months. I can now resume finding other excuses not to blog.
After I post a few entries I’d been putting off.
First, you might have heard of the big online buzz over what is supposed to be the only nude photo ever posed by Elizabeth Taylor.
It’s a photoshopped fake.
The original “body shot,” to which Taylor’s face was pasted on, is a “tasteful” Hollywood glamour nude, done in 1940 by photographer Peter Gowland and included in a photography guidebook he and his wife issued many years later.
The figure pictured in it doesn’t even remotely match the see-thru shots Taylor had made for Playboy on the set of Cleopatra. Those were published in 1963, less than five years after she was supposed to have posed for the nude. (The Playboy image does not appear to be online in any freely accessible place; here’s a tiny thumbnail of a similar shot.)
Radiohead.
For more than a decade, they’ve been a band on the cutting edge of music, or at least of music marketing.
So what do they do to give their new CD/LP/download product the splashy promotion they believe it deserves?
They come out with that most modern of media products.
A newspaper.
Specifically, a 12-page tabloid, handed out for free in select major cities, including this one. Online reports say copies went fast in many of these pass-out spots. (Last I heard, you could get one at Sonic Boom Records in Ballard, but only while supplies last.)
This sign of newsprint’s continued attention-grabbing viability comes two years and two weeks after the last print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Yes, I still mourn it.
I even dream about it. But I won’t get into that.
I will say I still believe there’s a P-I sized hole in the local media landscape. PubliCola, Seattle PostGlobe, Crosscut, and now SportsPress Northwest only fill pieces of that hole.
The SeattlePI.com website not only doesn’t fill its former parent journal’s role, it doesn’t even fill the role it could fill, as the go-to online local headline source.
It’s still designed like a newspaper’s web presence. The front page, and the second-tier directory pages, are each cluttered with 100 or more links, mostly to syndicated and wire pieces and to the contributions of unpaid bloggers. There’s no direct way to find the site’s own staff-written material (which remains remarkably good).
What’s worse, PI.com, as it’s currently structured, has little growth potential. It’s already generating as many “hits” as it did when it had a whole newspaper to give it content. It’s either just breaking even or is perpetually about to, according to which rumors you care to believe. There’s not much further revenue it can attract as a website with banner ads.
PI.com needs to find its next level.
With its current minimal staff, it likely couldn’t create a web app or a mobile app that could command a price from readers, a la Rupert Murdoch’s iPad “paper” The Daily or the newly paywalled NY Times site.
But it could repackage its current in-house content, plus the best of its bloggers’ contributions, into a free web app and/or mobile app.
This would make PI.com’s articles and essays better organized, easier to navigate and to read.
This would also offer advertisers with bigger, more productive ad spaces that would compliment, not clutter up, the reading experience.
Then of course, there’s always the possibility of moving the P-I back into print. Perhaps as a colorful freebie tabloid, one that could siphon off home and car ads from the SeaTimes and lifestyle ads from the slick regional monthlies.
Alternately, some of the local philanthropists who’d offered to take over the P-I from Hearst in 2009 could start their own paper, creating a new tradition.
Alas, after 22 years, Lloyd Dangle is retiring Troubletown, one of the finest sociopolitical comics to ever grace “alternative” newspaper pages.
Certain other “leftist” strips in the alt-weeklies are really less about politics and all about making their readers feel superior about themselves. But Dangle’s strip really was about the nonsense of politicians, the X-treme idiocy of the Bush era, the ongoing organized economic violence. And it covered them with wit and even grace.
If (as I believe) every satire contains, within its aesthetic, the world it would rather see, then Dangle’s dystopian panels advocated a contrasting utopia of intelligence, defiance, and principled action.
I’ll miss Troubletown.
Current excuse for infrequent postings here: I’m on another book deadline, which means my computer time is going to real (albeit not immediately renumerative) work.
Once this is out of the way, I’ll again be out in the field seeking gainful employment. (Remember, I’m not looking for something to write about. I’m looking for someone to work for.)
And I’m so much more than a writer. I shoot and retouch digital photos. I design graphics and web pages. I enter data, process words, and do many of the tasks every office needs getting done.
Meanwhile, in the outside world in recent days:
To any sane person (other than a marketer or a techie), the current Hollywood major-studio feature films are by and large loud and idiotic.
How did they get this way?
Mark Harris, writing in GQ, has his own theory. To Harris, there was a time when the likes of Star Wars and Jaws could coexist in the multiplexes with the likes of An Officer and a Gentleman and The Shining. Then….
Then came Top Gun. The man calling the shots may have been Tony Scott, but the film’s real auteurs were producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, two men who pioneered the “high-concept” blockbuster—films for which the trailer or even the tagline told the story instantly. At their most basic, their movies weren’t movies; they were pure product—stitched-together amalgams of amphetamine action beats, star casting, music videos, and a diamond-hard laminate of technological adrenaline all designed to distract you from their lack of internal coherence, narrative credibility, or recognizable human qualities. They were rails of celluloid cocaine with only one goal: the transient heightening of sensation.
That’s exactly what’s also wrong with America’s political discourse.
A cable TV channel (founded by a Hollywood studio) has taken effective control of one of the two major parties. Along with its radio pundit counterparts, it dumbs down all debate into simplistic emotional manipulations. You’re not even supposed to think about what they’re saying. You’re just supposed to react with anger/hubris/fear on cue.
PS: The 2011 Oscars? What a bore of self congratulatory tripe. Even more than usual.
The celebrities and their handlers are not even pretending, for the most part, to be living in a world remotely resembling the real America of the bottom 98 percent.
the ordeal was “sped up” in the wrong way, by taking out any potential for spontaneity and water cooler moments, leaving the bare bones outline of the massive droning ritual with no “breathing room,” no chance for personality or creativity. Much like your standard assembly line major studio movies themselves. The only “moments,” such as they were, were a senile Kirk Douglas refusing to stick to the script and the appearance of Mr Trent Reznor in a tux. That and a sharp political barb by the Best Documentary winner were, I am afraid, it.
One more reason for me to say: Save the movies. Kill Hollywood.
Just in time for the imminent arrival of baseball season, Grand Slams may again be slammed down within Seattle’s city limits.
The Denny’s restaurant on 4th Avenue South, which became the sort-of indie “4th Avenue Diner” a year or two back, is now a full fledged Denny’s again.
The place had been run all this time by the Denny’s regional franchisee. They had decided the Industrial District branch (the last Denny’s in Seattle proper) could attract just as much business without paying for the Denny’s name, menu, and ad support. Apparently they’ve changed their minds.
While I was watching the Super Bowl (hooray non-Steelers!) and watching Glee for the very first time (it’s like the Disney Channel’s High School Musical movies, only with less sincerity or realism), big news came down in the online realm.
Arianna Huffington and her investors announced they’re selling HuffingtonPost.com to AOL.
Ms. Huffington herself will stay on board, running both HuffPost and AOL’s existing content sites. These include Engadget, TechCrunch, Politics Daily, PopEater, Moviefone, MapQuest, Autoblog, FanHouse, StyleList, and Black Voices. (Taken as a whole, AOL’s current sites already employ more journalists and editors than any other online-only media concern.)
Since many tech-biz observers seem to believe that everything AOL touches turns to dross, there are worthy worries about the fate of everybody’s favorite liberal punditry and “celebrity skin” aggregation site.
Will AOL do for HuffPo what it did for (or rather, to) Time Warner?
Will HuffPo’s daring advocacy and insatiable curiosity for new trends become subsumed under AOL’s management driven policy (known within the company as “the AOL Way”), which determines what gets written about on its sites on a complex formula designed to drive productivity and search engine hits?
One thing’s for sure—the deal’s official price tag. It’s $315 million.
How much was Newsweek sold for? Apparently not a whole helluva lot.
How much was BusinessWeek sold for? Not a whole helluva lot more.
UPDATE: Here’s one of those tech-biz observers who thinks it’s a potentially lousy deal, but one both sides needed to make.
