SHORT STUFF TODAY, starting with another dare received on an email list.
A WILD BORE: Nickelodeon recently debuted Pelswick, a cartoon series created by our favorite Portland paraplegic satirist John Callahan. Its hero is a 13-year-old boy, who just happens to use a wheelchair.
One emailer on one of the lists I'm on noted that, not too long ago, such a character situation would never have been deemed an appropriate topic for a children's light-entertainment series. This correspondent also asked if anyone could "name a subject that isn't at least potentially entertaining."
Here's what I came up with:
- Claims adjustors.
- A year in the life of a flaxseed farm.
- A plastics chemist at Chrysler testing new PVC formulae for use in doorknobs and cup holders.
- A few hundred K of decompiled source code for HVAC systems-management software.
- A drizzly Tuesday night in late January in Aberdeen, Wash.
- A dark corner of outer space where no matter or light ever passes through.
- An all-New York City World Series.
(On the other hand, a drawn-out, never-concluding Presidential election is about as much fun as one can have with one's garments currently being worn.)
YOU ROCK, 'GRL'!: Media reaction to the ROCKRGRL Music Conference, Seattle's biggest alterna-music confab in five years, was nothing if not predictable.
Before the conference, the big papers described it as an attempt to get a "women in rock" movement back on track after the end of Lilith Fair (which was really an acoustic singer-songwriter touring show, and which had included almost no nonsinging female instrumentalists).
During the conference, the papers tried to brand everyone in it as reverse-sexists, out to denounce "the male dominated music industry" and anything or anyone with a Y chromosome. Many of the speakers and interviewees, however, declined to fall in line with this preconceived line. Some at the panel discussions took time to thank husbands, boyfriends, band members, and other XY-ers who've supported their work. Others in interviews insisted their musical influences and life heroes weren't as gender-specific as the interviewers had hoped. (Even at the discussion about violent "fans," someone noted that stalkers and attackers can be anyone (cf. the Selena tragedy).)
And as for the music industry, it's not built on gender but on money and power games; games which routinely prove disastrous for maybe 80 percent of male artists and 90 percent of female artists. (We'll talk a little more about this tomorrow.)
THE END OF SOMETHING BIG: Saw Game Show Network's hour-long tribute to Steve Allen a couple weeks back. Was reminded of how, seeing one of his last talk shows as a teenager, he was briefly my idol. He did silly things; he always kept the proceedings moving briskly. He also wrote fiction and nonfiction books, plays, and thousands of songs.
Of course, nobody remembers any of the songs, except the one he used as his own theme song. And the books and plays were essentially forgettable trifles. His main work was simply being funny on TV, and he was able to do it on and off for nearly 50 years.
As for his latter-day involvement with a right-wing pro-censorship lobby, you have to remember he was the son of vaudeville performers and was steeped in the old American secular religion of Wholesome Entertainment. To him, the past two or three decades' worth of cultural bad boys and girls probably didn't really represent a "moral sewer" but a mass heresy against what, to him, had been the One True Faith.
THE MARKETPLACE-O-IDEAS: The NY Times reports about some American leftist economists (including James Tobin, Jeremy Rifkin, and Bruce Ackerman) who've found an appreciative and excited audience for their ideas--in Europe.
You can think of it as the socio-philosophical equivalent of those U.S. alterna-music bands that could only get record contracts overseas.
You can also think of it as another of the unplanned effects of cultural globalization. Even avid opponents of a world system ruled by U.S. corporations are taking their ideas from Americans.
TOMORROW: Apres Napster, le deluge.
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