FRIDAY NIGHT was a night of triumph for local writer and former zine editor Steve Mandich.

TNT debuted its new Evel Knievel made-for-cable movie, officially based on Mandich’s now-out-of-print book Evel Incarnate. He held a party for some 50 friends and relatives, plus me, at Goofy’s sports bar in Ballard. He’s shown above in a custom Evel suit, which he asked well-wishers to autograph.

Mandich says he didn’t ask for any input in the making of the movie (“I just took their check and deposited it”), and invited his audience to laugh or make snide remarks about it.

It turned out to be a competent if un-stirring biopic, more entertaining than the two ’70s Knievel films (one starring the man himself, the other with George Hamilton). I particularly enjoyed the obviously fake digital paintings of the Las Vegas skyline, which utterly failed to hide the fact that the whole thing was filmed in Ontario.

Seattle attorney Greg Narver, brother of Empty Space Theater co-boss Allison Narver, got to be one of Ken Jennings’s 62-and-counting Jeopardy! slaughter victims on the episode shown Wednesday. (By the way, you might have noticed a lot of John Kerry commercials airing in local ad slots on J!, while Bush ads seem ubiquitous on sports and “reality” shows.)

…how TV news will survive in a postmodern world; implying that American journalism as we know it has been embedded in an old-style “modern” zeitgeist.

Bainbridge Island preservationists are up in arms over rumors claiming Jennifer Aniston and hubby Brad Pitt might move into one of the island’s multimillion-dollar “cabins,” thus turning the ferry suburb into a lala land affordable only by celebrities (instead of the lawyers and software execs crowding the place now).

If she finds a lousy reception here, maybe Aniston could still move to an island–the mysterious supervillain island where her soap-star dad is currently holed up.

BusinessWeek has proclaimed the death of the “Mass Market” in the U.S.

With the rise of tertiary cable channels, ultra-specialized magazines (my current fave: Physicians’ Travel), and the Web, advertisers are increasingly moving to media that target specific audiences. Caught in the resulting fiscal death spiral: Network TV, local TV, and daily papers.

Perhaps you won’t miss the days when half the country watched the same sitcoms, and 80 percent of households received “the paper” (typically a dully-written, Republican-partisan sheet) every day.

But if Procter & Gamble or General Motors wishes to no longer support general-interest journalism, who will? Not web ads, not sufficiently, at least not yet.

A lot of us lefties have had our beefs against the news coverage from the networks and the daily papers this past year and a half. To a great extent, the big media’s superficial, authority-driven war coverage was driven by the twin drives to keep costs down and to gain readers/viewers with spectacular stories/images. Thus, the mania in 2003 for “embedded” reporters, who got to cover the war up close as long as they saw and said what the White House wanted them to see and say. Undercover, investigative stuff is much more labor intensive, and doesn’t guarantee any flashy payoff.

As a long-term-unemployed journalist myself (will someone out there please hire me please?), I’ve seen the long-term effects of this shift in ad support. It’s undoubtedly the real reason the Seattle Times wants to end its joint operating agreement with the Post-Intelligencer. It’s the real reason chain-owned radio stations are decimating their news departments, and national magazines are buying fewer freelance articles. It’s a trend that won’t be fully reversed even when the general economy improves.

So what’ll save quality news in the U.S.? Pledge drives? Church subsidies? Foreign imports?

I haven’t the answers. If you have, lemme know.

…just keeps getting shriller and dumber. Now, a prowar outfit is trying to pressure movie theaters into not showing Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

A quick Net check shows this group is led by one Howard Kaloogian. He recently ran for a US Senate seat in California, on an anti-immigration, anti-environmental, anti-abortion, anti-gay, pro-weapons platform. He also played some part in the gubernatorial recall campaign that put Schwarzenegger in the state house down there; other recall advocates allege he siphoned contributions from the recall drive to put into his own campaign.

Another principal in the drive is a Calif. campaign operative and former Reagan advisor named Sal Russo. Kaloogian and Russo previously co-ran the successful campaign to stop CBS from airing its Reagans miniseries.

As Frederick Sweet writes, the anti-Moore drive is no grassroots support-our-troops campaign but a smear tactic from high GOP sources. “The Bush Republicans are trying very hard to stop Americans from seeing Michael Moore’s movie. They are also trying to hide the fact that their campaign is attempting to smear Moore and pressure theater owners into not running his movie. Hopefully, the Republicans’ censorship and intimidation will fail and millions of Americans will soon learn how George Bush had a business relationship with the Bin Laden family. They will learn this just before the next presidential election.”

The Lucking Fakers were thoroughly trounced. The mighty Detroit Pistons, a real basketball team (as opposed to an overpaid, overhyped bunch of divas) handily won the basketball championship Tuesday night.

The victory was a mighty blow for all that is right and good in America, and a slap against the NBA’s powers-that-be and its “broadcast partners” (ABC, ESPN, TNT). In the post-Jordan era, the league and the networks have conspired to treat the Lucking Fakers as The Team That Deserves Everything, The Team You MUST Love. All 29 other squads received as much combined respect as the Harlem Globetrotters’ sham opponents.

Back during the regular season, TNT could barely bother even covering game one of its weekly doubleheaders; instead, the channel spent two and a half hours plugging the Lucking Fakers’ forthcoming appearance in game two.

In the playoffs, the national print media joined the broadcasters in predicting a Lucking Fakers walkoff. Sure, the Pistons had more teamwork, more energy, and more balance, but they didn’t have more endorsement deals!

So the Pistons’ victory, not just by an edge but by a trounce, proves that there’s still room for sports in American sports.

I really, really want light entertainment programming to be a permanent part of the local Seattle TV scene, which it hasn’t been for more than two years.

So I wanted KIRO’s Star Search Seattle to be a smash.

Alas, it’s a dud.

The original Star Search format, as you may recall from the old Ed McMahon series, would be a natural for a talent-rich town such as ours. It mixed singers, dancers, comedians, “spokesmodels,” and other performance categories, in simple one-on-one competitions before celebrity judges. The recent CBS network revival featured four categories.

Instead, Star Search Seattle depicted only one performance genre—karaoke singing.

In six one-hour episodes, a total of 36 amateur and semipro vocalists belted their way through various ’70s-soul moldies and office-radio-station ballads, to the accompaniment of canned backing tracks. In one nod to the original, the singers were judged two at a time. The pairings weren’t the fairest—decent song-stylists often faced off against one another, and pathetic wannabes often competed against other pathetic wannabes.

To their credit, the judges (Mr. President Chris Ballew, record producer Glenn Lorbiecki, and local DJs Lisa Foster and Mitch Elliott) never insulted the contestants, but gave kind and constructive criticism. (I still don’t know why Ballew and Lorbiecki each had one vote in the judging, while Foster and Elliott had to split a vote.)

Anyhoo, you’ve one more chance to see the show, such as it is. The big season finale will be telecast live at 8 p.m. this Friday (6/18/04), originating from the Clearwater Casino (the series’ main sponsor, as noted, ’50s-game-show style, by logos decorating the studio set of the preliminary episodes).

And the station’s promising a second season sometime. I hope next time they’ll dump the American Idol aping and embrace the something-for-everyone format of the original Star Search.

Indeed, I could envision new genre categories for a Seattle talent competition. Slam poetry, of course, but also DJ-ing (in turntable and laptop divisions), conceptual/performance art, and even musical performances that include the playing of actual instruments.

Today, some web links recalling the monstrous politics behind the happy-face mask.

• Dan Modela discusses Dark Victory, his book investigating Reagan’s lifelong ties to MCA, former parent company of Universal Studios and the most notoriously Mob-connected company in Hollywood. (Universal’s now being acquired by GE, which once sponsored a TV show Reagan hosted and MCA produced.)
• Third World Traveler has links to several accounts of Reagan’s disastrous foreign policies, includng his luuuvvv for dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere. (Among Ronnie’s enamored: Saddam, Osama, and Pinochet.)
• Mark Hertsgaard, in a 1996 interview, mentions how Reagan was given virtually free rein by a submissive Washington press corps.
• David Swanson remembers the secret Iran-hostage deal that gained Reagan the White House in the first place.
• William Rivers Pitt insists that ” virtually every significant problem facing the American people today can be traced back to the policies and people that came from the Reagan administration. It is a laundry list of ills, woes and disasters that has all of us, once again, staring apocalypse in the eye.”
• David Corn, in a 1998 Nation essay, recalls “66 (Unflattering) Things About Ronald Reagan.”
• And Greg Palast emphatically recalls Reagan as “a conman” and “a coward.”
• But Madison, WI’s Capital Times asserts that progressives oughta learn from Reagan’s “willingness to fight for his faith.”

I’ve lately been studying a lot about “positive attitudes,” and the ways in which people who exude such attitudes can achieve their biggest dreams.

As many obits have noted, Reagan was a positive-thinking epitome. He had a winning smile, an easygoing voice, a knack for delivering simple jokes, and baby blue eyes. He diligently used his positive image to bring what I still believe were negative policies to the US and the world.

Sure, he never got around to some of his more contentious platforms (re-outlawing abortion, entirely dismantling the social safety net).

But he did get a lot of wrong things done.

He fired the air traffic controllers.

He slashed aid to the poorest, sending tens of thousands onto the streets.

He slashed college financial aid, reversing the postwar trend toward the democratizing of education.

He preached about smaller government, while he built up record budget deficits.

He started a massive buildup of nuclear weapons.

He arranged to keep the Iran hostages imprisoned to help his election drive; then let the whole Iran/Contra mess happen.

He enthusiastically supported every genocidal dictator who used anti-Communism as his excuse.

And, along with his evil twin Margaret Thatcher, he spread a gospel of blind faith in The Free Market. In practice, this meant massive corporate welfare, military-industrial contract corruption, the economic decimation of the middle class, the whole “greed is good” national nonsense, environmental catastrophes, jobless “recoveries,” and most of the wrong directions this country’s been headed in ever since.

I once wrote that the fictional character Reagan most closely resembled wasn’t Rambo but Simon the Likable, a villain from the last season of Get Smart! The Chief tells Max as they trail him, “He’s a terrorist, a gangster, a killer…” (the Chief catches a glimpse of Simon’s baby blue eyes and delicate smile) “…and a really nice guy.”

A British cable channel is claiming to offer the ultimate low-budget “reality” series. Watching Paint Dry would be “exactly what it says on the tin. Every day a different kind of paint will be put on to a wall and you get the chance to vote for your favourite. Confirmed contestants include matte, silk, gloss, satin, vinyl, eggshell textured and smooth masonry—all of whom are eagerly looking forward to their first brush with fame.” Something tells me this is a cheeky hoax, but it’s still fun to imagine.

Finally saw a complete episode of American Idol. Like most “reality” shows, it constructs a very specific, detailed fictional “reality.” This particular show’s fabulist conceit is that the banal rehashing of ’70s soul music is, and always has been, the main and only form of popular vocal music in the U.S.

A few years back, some baby-boomer intellectual wrote a book in which she whined about Those Kids Today, whose music didn’t got the same soul as that old time rock n’ roll. I don’t know if that author’s an Idol viewer, but the show’s conceit might fit her idea of a musical utopia, in a “be careful what you wish for” way.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, KOMO-TV anchordude Dan Lewis has started each 11 p.m. newscast on the station’s roof. This serves no journalistic purpose. I can only imagine three non-journalistic purposes for the ongoing stunt:

• To make the broadcast seem Important and Relevant, even though it’s usually a rehash of the most gruesome personal events already exploited at 5 and 6:30;
• To show off how Lewis’s carefully sculpted hair can remain perfectly in place, no matter what the weather;
• To let Lewis repeatedly drop the name “Fisher Plaza,” the station owners’ block-long, massively under-occupied office development.

…not to be judgmental about judgmental people anymore. But sometimes I can’t help it. Such as when KOMO’s voice-O-relative-sanity Ken Schram gently lambastes the NIMBY hypocrites fighting he homeless “Tent City” camp in Bothell.

AND SO IT HAS COME TO THIS: Frasier ends tonight, after eleven seasons and 264 episodes, of which only one had been half filmed in Seattle. That’s never stopped the local media from considering the series to be “ours;” a portryal, to varying degrees of accuracy, of the local urban zeitgeist.

I must, at least partly, agree with the assessment.

While written and executed on the Paramount lot in LA (one of the early writers, Ken Levine, did spend a little time around here as a Mariners announcer), the show did express what the culture-analysts call a “sense of place.” It was a place that only barely existed in real life, alongside several other Seattles, except in the highly selective realities of the early Seattle Weekly and KUOW.

In 1993, Nirvana’s final album was about to come out. Microsoft Windows was still a kludgy interface add-on to MS-DOS. Seattle was still mostly Boeing Country. Our wealthy were fewer, and much less ostentatious. The upscale home of choice was a huge waterfront “cabin,” not a condo.

But over the next seven years, it came to be. All the “market price” restaurants. All the frou-frou supper clubs. All the high-rise townhomes. All the gourmet cheese shops. All the mauve men’s shirts. All the uptight attitudes.

Now, the Frasier universe goes into that great rerun in the sky. What will be the next great fictional Seattle?

Let’s not wait for Hollywood to invent it. Let’s make it ourselves.

…a “new” celebrity category—the non-singing, non-dancing, music video model. I guess the NYT finally got cable, some two decades too late.