…the International Channel. It aired blocks of programming from all different countries, right on basic cable, with ethnically-targeted commercials and everything.

Part of what I loved about it was the music shows. Samba, Bollywood, tango, Afropop, Hungarian operettas, Japanese techno, and much much more. And it was all curated by and for folks of these various ethnicities themselves! It was the real stuff, not Paul Simonized for baby-boomer comfort listening.

Some of this joyous cacophony is back, thanks to the National Geographic Channel. It’s got a post-midnight music block, Nat Geo Music. The block runs in Italy as a 24-hour channel; Geographic’s talking about launching it as a separate channel here.

The show compiles music videos (remember those things?), documentary shorts, and concert clips by lots of different people in lots of different places. Sure, the show’s got mellow folkie stuff, reggae, salsa, etc. But it’s also got digital cut-up music and raucous celebratory stuff and dissonant percussion. (And, in good National Geographic tradition, they’re not afraid of a little artistic nudity in the videos.)

About all you won’t hear on Nat Geo Music: Elmer Bernstein’s bombastic orchestral theme from the old National Geographic network specials.

…I documented local sign structures that no longer bore any messages. Now, it seems there’s a whole Signifying Nothing city. It seems the city leaders of Sao Paolo, tired of their burg being ignored by the world in favor of the smaller but prettier Rio, took the bold step of banning billboards and most other outdoor advertising signs. They called it a move against visual pollution.

Of course, a city without advertising is still the same city, just a little less dressed. In this case, it’s a huge city with some stunning skyscrapers and civic monuments, but also a lot of non-cosmetic civic problems, many arising from an exploding population and poor urban planning.

…(see below), last Tuesday apparently saw the demise of Procter & Gamble Productions. This would also mean the end of sponsor-owned programming as a regular feature on the old-line broadcast networks.

When network radio was launched in the U.S. in the 1920s, networks would sell whole blocks of time to advertisers. The advertisers, in turn, would hire ad agencies to create and package both the commercials for the advertisers’ products and the shows that would surround the commercials. Procter and its soap-making competitors were the main sponsors of melodramatic daytime serials; thus the nickname “soap operas.” One of the first of these, The Guiding Light, was originally sponsored by Procter’s “P and G White Naphtha Soap.”

When TV came along, so did sponsor-owned programming. But TV’s higher production costs meant such ventures as The Colgate Comedy Hour and The Camel News Caravan faded from view.

But Procter & Gamble Productions (PGP) continued, like the stories on its shows. At its 1982-84 peak, PGP controlled 25 hours of network programming per week (more than Fox or The CW broadcasts these days).

Through PGP, P&G financed the shows and exerted both censorship and hiring control over them. But the shows’ actual production was subcontracted to ad agency Benton & Bowles. That agency disappeared some years ago in a series of global corporate mergers. Its TV-production unit was renamed Televest, then spun off as Telenext Media, which is apparently now an independent company.

(I know, this story’s getting to be as convoluted as any As the World Turns storyline.)

Anyhoo, on July 1, PGP’s name and logo disappeared from the ATWT and GL closing credits, replaced by that of Telenext. The shows’ official Internet message boards changed addresses from “pgpphoto.com” to “tnmphoto.com.”

Without any official notice of what, if anything, has changed, online message boards are rife with speculation.

Some users claim P&G must have sold off its interests in the shows. That wouldn’t be out of character with the company’s recent spate of portfolio-shuffling. (In recent years P&G’s bought Tampax, Gillette, Braun, and Clairol, while selling Comet, Duncan Hines, Crisco, Jif, and Folger’s.)

Of course, the credit change could just be a matter of semantics. But many of these message-board users have complained about P&G’s (mis)management of the serials, including drastic budget cuts on GL and its alleged cold feet concerning ATWT’s current gay-love storyline. Some of these users say they would like the shows to become independently owned.

Of course, even the deftest indie producer would have to be pretty clever to effectively confront the daytime-soap genre’s collapsing ratings and revenues.

But that’s a topic for another day. Tune in again.

…Kids WB signed off in May. Someone calling himself Peter Paltridge did notice, and offers a retrospective of the cartoon programming block’s first and last days on the air. If you don’t understand why Earthworm Jim was a greater show than Skunk Fu, you soon will.

Warning: The following essay mixes metaphors pretty much without discipline.

This day after Indie Day finds much of the nation in a pensive mood, waiting for the pages to turn and for 1/20/09 to show up already.

Meanwhile, the reign of Nixon 2.0 drags on in a seemingly interminable final act. It’s beyond my old metaphor of the annoying jam band that will never leave the stage with its trite 45-minute noodling routines. It’s more like the emotionally abusive old relative who ruins every family gathering by reciting the same endless, unfunny racist “jokes” and always messing up the punch lines. Nobody tells him to shut the hell up anymore, because they know he won’t.

During this time, everything’s winding down. The thievery on high gets more desperate and more overt. The cast of crooks gets more blatantly maniacal.

(Next in our metaphor megamix: The pre-climax of an old mad scientist movie when the mad scientist goes utterly kabong and starts declaring himself to be immortal and invincible, just before his monster/alien ally/chemical formula/hypnotic spell turns around to attack him.)

Yes, a few industries with close ties to the Thief-in-Chief are reaping obscene profits, while the economy as a whole is speeding into reverse.

Yes, this stupid/tragic/inane/unneeded war drags on and on.

Yes, the graft, the corruption, the sweetheart dealing, the money grubbing, and the power grabbing all have gotten as blatant as you could imagine, then went beyond that, and still keep going beyond that.

Yes, the nationalism/tribalism excuse for a state religion of FUD (computer-world-ese for “fear, uncertainty, and doubt”) keeps getting trotted out in the face of decreasing belief.

Yes, the environmental health of this and all the other continents gets ever more precarious.

And yet—

There’s still so much in this land for which to be grateful.

There’s still so much wealth (material and other) from which we can rebuild the old wastes.

But we can’t wait until January, or even November.

We need to build upon all the values that make up America-at-its-best. The loveable human-mongrel melting pot, the can-do spirit, the love of adventure, the love of novelty, the optimism, the devil-may-care foolishness, the risk-taking, the what-if imagining.

Those are all vital aspects of what’s made this country great.

Those other things, the bigotry and the fearmongering and the inter-tribal hate, those aren’t really American.

Alas, those traits can be found in every big society on Earth and a lot of the smaller ones.

And since America is a huge mix-tape of folks from all those places, it’s only natural that we’d pick up on those cultures’ dark sides, and that they’d have melded into one big all-American dark side.

But for every yang there’s a yin and vice versa.

This X-Treme-osity is America’s weakness and her strength.

And it’s how we’re going to get out of this mess-of-messes.

Yes, the right-wing firebrand ex-senator helped to perfect what we’ve all come to know as conservative standard operating procedure. Bash the blacks and the gays; openly appeal to fear and bigotry; proclaim a love for “America” that includes a hatred for many, if not for most, of the people living in it.

But it’s important to remember, no one politician, not even Helms with his devious genius for divisiveness, created this recipe.

Helms simply exploited and extended the heritage of intolerance and lizard-brain emotions that’s long been a part of our nation’s dark side.

Of course, there’s another side to out nation’s history. Many sides, in fact. I’ll mention them in my next post (which, thanks to the conventions of blogging, you may have read prior to reading this).

But not as eloquent about it all as this guy.

To mix sports metaphors, the city punted. Nickels took a dive. They settled for a settlement. They whored out to Clay Bennett. They took sheckels of gold (and the vaguest of non-promises by the NBA for a new team in some future decade) instead of continuing the fight to keep the Sonics here.

The separate Howard Schultz lawsuit continues, and is our only remaining chance to keep this team, OUR team, our first big-league team.

This feels worse than the 1978 finals loss, the 1996 finals loss, and the trading of Ray Allen combined.

…(really) has today’s vulvic-imagery-in-a-consumer-product image. It’s for margarine. Bearing the name of Lee Iacocca. You know the puns you’ll see in the item’s comment thread.

…refer y’all to any Wall St. Journal opinion essays. But here’s one I like. It’s all about a serious modern poet’s love for Warner Bros. Cartoons. Really.

…today to Don S. Davis, the unassuming, deep-voiced former U of British Columbia teacher who became one of film and TV’s most prolific character actors. His longest gig was seven seasons on Stargate SG-1. He was also Scully’s dad on The X-Files. But to me he’ll always be Major Briggs on Twin Peaks.

…for those of us in western Washington’s prog-politix community. Our top regional campaign prospect, Congressional candidate Darcy Burner, lost her home in a fire.

She and her family are safe. But she’ll have to find new digs within her district, at a time when she’s trying to fund a serious election run against incumbent Dave Reichert. That fundraising has gone quite well, particularly with “Netroots” donations from online supporters. Those funds can’t be used for personal expenses, of course. She and her hubby will be arranging to relocate themselves. It’ll be up to her campaign staff, and her campaign supporters, to shoulder more of the campaigning and campaign fundraising work while Burner’s personal time/attention deals with this tragic distraction.

Greta Christina intelligently discusses a topic about which I’ve occasionally and incoherently ranted—non-thinking and anti-thinking in “alternative” culture.

…by people with far too much time on their hands: A comprehensive guide to fictional breakfast cereals.

Like many “sixties youth icons,” Carlin was already 30 by the summer-O-love. Aside from being an anti-censorship icon (who nonetheless got his share of “family entertainment” roles, he was one of the last bridges between the Ed Sullivan and Saturday Night Live eras. He also virtually invented the pay-TV comedy special genre, that most direct of storytelling formats.