I haven’t mentioned it much here, but I’ve been admiring the online scribblings of HorsesAss.org’s David “Goldy” Goldstein. Most recently, he’s lucidly compared the totally-made-up faux-controversy over a newspaper advertisement with the classic play/movie Betrayal.

…(other than Canadian editions of U.S. mags) delineates “How George Bush Became the New Saddam.”

…a Courtney Love-branded perfume? Even she’s not so sure.

In my early years, motels and hotels in Western Washington would advertise “Canadian Money Accepted At Par.” Nowadays, everybody will be doing that, since both countries’ bucks are of equal value.

…the rhetorical question of whether Americans are all now living within someone’s insane delusions.

Without making a big PR fuss about it, KIRO-TV’s quietly moved into high-definition local production. Last night’s prime-time documentary special, Cold Facts About Our Warm Planet, was particularly notable.

With lush HD videography and few commercial interruptions, it showed the local effects of global warming. We saw shrinking glaciers, prematurely melting mountain snowpacks, tinder-dry forest lands, declining salmon runs, potential sea-level rises, and more.

It was all narrated by a low-key Steve Raible. (How’d he grow up so smart, when his fellow early Seahawks star Steve Largent went wingutty?) Raible calmly took us through the evidence and the arguments about our current warming trend. He explained the background science, with the help of UW scientists and experts.

Raible stayed away from casting blame or judgmentalism, and rightly so. If global warming really is influenced by human activity, and I believe it is, it’s taken the entirety of human civilization to get us there. Anti-SUV sanctimony won’t save the planet. That can only occur with a lot of big and small steps by a lot of people, including people whose current lifestyles are different from yours.

Kudos to Cold Facts’ writer-director Ben Saboonchian and videographer Peter Frerichs.

I don’t know if or when the station will repeat the special. It should, and it should put the whole doc up online.

My ol’ emo/folkie musician pals Gary Heffern and Chris Eckman (the latter from the Walkabouts), most of whose recordings have only been issued by Glitterhouse Records in Germany, have released their first domestically-distributed music in years. Appropriately enough, it’s a track (called “Wave”) on
Song of America, a three-CD box set compiling new versions of classic American tunes, from “Lakota Dream Song” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” to “I Am Woman” and “Streets of Philadelphia.”

The mastermind behind this master mix? None other than America’s last law-abiding chief lawyer, Janet Reno. (No, unlike her immediate successor, she doesn’t pretend to sing.)

Attended the Washington News Council’s panel discussion at the downtown library Monday evening, entitled “Today’s News: A ‘Webolution’ in Progress.”

The six panelists came from different corners of journalism/commentary (Cory Bergman of KING-TV, Robert Hernandez of the Seattle Times, Josh Feit of the Stranger, Alex Johnson of MSNBC, Chuck Taylor of Crosscut, and Joan “McJoan” McCarter from Daily Kos). The moderator, Merrill Brown, used to work for MSNBC and was now with a Vancouver-based “citizen journalism” site, NowPublic.

But all seven of them are nowadays competing for the hearts, minds, and eyeballs of you, the online reader.

As one who’s seen this medium (or, as one panelist called it, a “distribution vehicle” that can carry umpteen different types of media) grow, I must confess I didn’t learn much I didn’t already know, and didn’t hear many arguments I hadn’t already heard. Buzzwords included: “Aggregation” (i.e., links to stories on other sites), “user generated content” (i.e., unpaid bloggers and videographers), “the end of the news cycle” (i.e., posting new content all the time), the supposed last days of print newspapers (someone suggested that some papers might not last another decade; I say we’re more likely to see some suburban and JOA papers fade out, but local monopoly papers in major markets would decline far more slowly).

The one real disagreement came when an audience member asked how these different organizations would reach out to under-40 readers. The Times guy mentioned recruiting teen volunteer bloggers from the Vera Project to cover rock shows at Bumbershoot. Crosscut’s Taylor, being the ever-dutiful David Brewster acolyte, scoffed at the very idea of needing anything to do with them pesky kids. The Stranger’s Feit gave the loveably cocky reply that his outfit already owns the advertiser-beloved young demographic; it’s built into everything they do. MSNBC.com’s Johnson had the best answer: He’s got a genuine 26-year-old single woman running the afternoon editor’s desk.

You’ll be able to view the whole thing on the state-owned cable channel TVW sometime in the coming weeks.

…keep leaving us. The latest sad loss: game-show legend Brett Somers.

…and so does punditry: As of 9 p.m. PT tomorrow, the NY Times will stop hiding its op-ed columnists behind a paid-access firewall. The NYT’s commentator stable is the most prestigious in the biz, at least in this country. But there are too many great commentin’ guys n’ gals on the Inkernets who don’t, or can’t, do the pay-per-view deal (not that some of us would want to).

Conservative politicians want to help cool down the Earth by banning certain energy-hog home appliances.

The catch: They’re British Conservative politicians.

Yeah, Bush still refuses to admit he was wrong.

Yeah, he plans to keep the war of occupation going forever; he’ll leave our sons and daughters in harm’s way until he leaves office, and set things up so it’ll be darned difficult for the next leader to get ’em out.

Nothing new. Nothing unexpected.

This moment in the national zeitgeist feels like a moment in one of those multi-band benefit rock concerts–that point where the worst band on the bill, the sluggish jam band that tries too hard to be the next Phish only without the skills or the songs or the energy or the talent, ignores the 20-minute set limit all the other bands onthe bill must follow, and instead plays out its entire repertoire, complete with extended egotistical noodling passages.

Everybody’s waiting for the band to shut up and get off the stage already, except the band itself. The band’s members, in the role of a mutual admiration/masturbation society, are so in love with their own imagined fabulousness that they can’t even imagine the whole room not adoring them.

Now, imagine you can’t simply leave the arena. You’ve carpooled with a couple members of the next scheduled band. You can only (1) ignore the jam band from heck as best you can, (2) repeat a silent mantra to yourself of “This too shall pass,” or (3) take action–start a hearty booing section in the audience, toss empty plastic beer cups stageward, bribe the PA operator to cut off the band’s juice.

Like the jam band from heck, the neocon machine refuses to concede anything–not its control of the stage, not its incompetence, not its delusions of godhood.

And, like the jam band from heck, the con-game operators in DC imagine, nay fully Believe, the world will love their music (or history will avenge them) if they just keep playing long enough and loudly enough.

The analogy’s end limit is that the jam band from hell can’t cause hundreds or thousands of brutal, needless deaths and maimings for no practical cause except the enriching of its friends’ bank accounts.

And the jam band from heck doesn’t have 480-some days in which to continue its reign of error.

On one level, David Lynch’s brief memoir/manifesto Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity is, like most of Lynch’s body of work, bewildering.

On another level, like most of Lynch’s body of work, it makes perfect sense by its own individualistic sense of logic.

The bewildering part is when Lynch frequently segues into endorsement spots for Transcendental Meditation. He’s practiced it for almost as long as he’s practiced filmmaking, and now has his own “David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace.”

I’m sure Lynch has sincerely benefitted from his TM practice. It’s a minor shame he takes the movement’s PR lines at face value. For some reason I’d expected more healthy skepticism from him. But instead he waxes enthusiastic about the “unified field” and a thousand meditators in one town miraculously reducing the crime rate.

I’m sure Lynch’s daily meditation habit helps to ground his mind, refresh his creative juices, and enable him to withstand the massive stresses that face any Hollywood player.

I’m not convinced the TM system is, by itself, any more effective than any other meditative regime. However, any human discipline can be more effectively executed with instruction and guidance, such as that provided by the TM organization’s professional trainers.

Catching the Big Fish is beautifully designed, and beautifully written. Just as in his screenplays, which seldom let dialogue get in the way of imagery, his prose is short and sweet and directly propels the narrative line.

Lynch talks only a little about his films, explaining at one point that he doesn’t want his comments to overshadow the works themselves. (This is in a piece about why he doesn’t like DVD commentary tracks.)

When he does talk about his films, it’s in the form of little vignettes. Befitting his early training as a painter, his stories in the book are all about stringing together a succesison momentary images.

He does talk about his new digital-video feature, Inland Empire, and why he’s turned permanently to shooting on video. Previously famous for painstakingly crafting the perfect shot, now Lynch is a total convert to digital video’s flexibility, its versatility, its economy, and its capability for unlimited retakes and experimentation.

And, as you might expect, he discusses the apparent contradiction between his TM-fueled drive for “bliss” and the dark, often violent content in his works:

“There are many, many dark things flowing around in this world now, and omst films reflect the world in which we live. They’re stories. Stories are always going to have conflict. They’re going to have highs and lows, and good and bad….It’s good for the artist to understand conflict and stress. Those things can give you ideas. But I guarantee you, if you have enough stress, you won’t be able to create. And if you have enough conflict, it will just get in the way of your creativity. You can understand conflict, but you don’t have to live in it.”

And, I LOVE what Lynch says about “world peace” as something we should work for, not dismissively joke about.

On this day, which has predictably and tragically become an annual call to fear, that’s as good a message as any:

“May everyone be happy. May everyone be free of disease.May auspiciousness be seen everywhere. May suffering belong to no one.

Peace.”

…asks the musical question, “Is There Anything Good About Men?” His long and surprising answer: Yes.

…may still tout the notion that our local real estate biz isn’t crashing at all, not really, at least not like some other places.

That rosy perspective hasn’t stopped Washington Mutual’s CEO from warning the national housing market could be heading for a “near-perfect storm.”