JUST AS I START to get bored with my existing selection of cable channels, AT&T Digital Cable serves me up a fresh batch. In an effort to stave off the juggernaut of home-satellite-dish ownership, they’ve quickly gone and snagged up a bunch of the secondary and tertiary program services dish owners have long enjoyed.

Among them, in no particular order:

• Toon Disney. Yes, Disney’s TV animation division has amassed enough episodes in the past 15 years (starting with Adventures of the Gummi Bears for an entire channel to do nothing but rerun them. Some of them (i.e. DuckTales) hold up better than others.
• Newsworld International. The first of three Canadian-connected channels on today’s list, this is the U.S. feed of the CBC’s cable news channel; supplemented with English-language programs from other world broadcasters. Serious news coverage about non-U.S. residents who aren’t even named Elian–what a concept!
• MuchMusic. Also Canada-based, this is cable’s last non-Viacom-owned video music channel. And it’s full of clips and tunes picked to entice audiences, rather than to fit Viacom’s and the major labels’ marketing synergies.
• Trio. Currently owned by USA Networks, but begun by the CBC, this channel (whose name is explained as standing for “Drama, Documentaries, and Film”) offers “Television the Rest of the World Is Watching.” In other words, English-language fare from Canadian, British, Australian and New Zealand producers that hadn’t found any other U.S. home. Chief among this is Britain’s #1-rated series, the 40-year-old primetime soap Coronation Street, of which Trio airs two half-hour episodes from mid-1995 each weekday. (CBC airs four episodes a week, same as the show’s rate of production, on a three-month delay.)
• Bloomberg TV. Another financial channel, but simultaneously more hyped-up and more “real” than CNBC. Instead of celebrity reporters, it’s got no-name news readers whose faces are crammed into a tiny upper-left corner of the screen, surrounded by ever-changing price stats. And instead of emphasizing NASDAQ tech stocks, it gives priority to such real-world financial figures as soybean futures!
• Tech TV (formerly ZDTV, from its roots in the Ziff-Davis computer magazines). Watch the dot-coms churn and the home-PC users burn on this channel, devoted half to reporting computer-biz news and half to hyping cool hardware and software gadgetry.
• GoodLife TV. G-rated doesn’t have to mean dull, as this moldy-oldies channel proves with cool old ’40s B-movies and strange old ’60s reruns (Jimmy Durante Presents the Lennon Sisters).
• CNN/Sports Illustrated. Another sports-news wheel channel, a la ESPNews (which AT&T Digital cable already carries). Aside from the likes of fired-coaches’ press conferences, there’s really little need for more than one of these (especially since you can learn what your favorite team did tonight more quickly on the Net).
• The Outdoor Channel (“Real Outdoors for Real People”). Fishing, gold-panning, hunting, target shooting, power-boating, jet-skiing, RV-ing, bird watching, outdoor cooking. Even the occasional conservation topic here and there.
• Style. A women’s magazine of the air, with shows about food, travel, decorating, makeup, and especially fashion. The latter programs include at least one see-thru runway-show shot per hour.
• WedMD/The Health Network. Medical and wellness-advice shows. One of them, Food for Life, co-stars none other than original MTV VJ Mark Goodman!
• ilifetv (short for “Inspirational Life TV”). Pat Robertson’s 700 Club was originally conceived as an all-around lifestyle and talk show that just happened to be by and for born-again Christians. This channel brings back that concept as a 24-hour thang, funded by cable-subscriber fees (no pleas for viewer donations). You can see a recipe segment that smoothly segues into an interview with the leader of Teens For Abstinence; or an evangelist described in his PR as “an MTV-savvy minister.”
• Playboy TV. The Spice channel is censored hardcore porn–depictions of real (though formulaic) sex, with all phallic shots edited out. Playboy TV is true softcore–professionally-choreographed (and halfway-professionally-photographed), semi-abstract segments intended to be both sexually and aesthetically intriguing; sometimes with real attempted stories and characters involved.

Still not on local cable screens but wanted, at least by me: The Food Network, ABC SoapNet, Boomerang (Cartoon Network’s oldies channel).

NEXT: If you’re really nice, I might share some pieces of my next book.

IN OTHER NEWS (Mike Barber in the P-I, on unseasonably-low levels in hydroelectric lakes): “A walk down through the terraced brown bluffs is a stroll through the history of modern beer. Colorful newer cans and bottles glimmer in the sun at the higher levels, giving way to more faded cans tossed overboard in the pre-Bud Lite era.”

ELSEWHERE:

• Another site that condenses popular movies to their absurd essences….

YOU DON’T NEED those TV Land “Retromercials” to get a remembrance of the ’70s energy crisis nowadays.

But it’d still be fun to exhume some of the old public-service ads from the era. Like the one where Fred Flintstone sings and dances about “Conservation Energy,” or the one with images of a decrepit old ’20s gas station and a solemn announcer proclaiming that “gas for less is gone–less gas is here to stay.”

Between the government-sanctioned extortion games of Calif. electric-generating companies (spun off from electric “retail” providers by a “deregulation” scheme designed to turn the power biz into a high-yield game for stock-market speculators), OPEC oil-supply manipulations, domestic oil-and-gas biz consolidations (such as the Exxon-Mobil merger and BP’s gobbling-up of Amoco and Arco), and climate changes that’ve (perhaps permanently) limited the capacity of Northwest hydro plants, we’re essentially in a mess folks.

And it gets worse when you ponder that this might not be a confluence of bad tidings, but the end of a confluence of good tidings.

That is, the cheap oil and abundant electricity North Americans enjoyed in the ’90s may have been just temporary blessings, not permanent trends of which today’s hassles are momentary interruptions.

In other words: The bad good-old-days of the Energy Crisis are back. And this time, they may stay a while longer.

Get out the CB radios to search for gasoline (OK, you’ll probably use cell phones with wireless e-mail instead, but the idea’s the same). Bring back the toilet bricks, the three extra layers of fiberglass attic insulation, the vanpools, and the notices in the windows of movie theaters and shopping centers apologizing for keeping their electric signs on.

Also, it won’t just be in the back pages of obscure magazines but in junk e-mails that you’ll find solicitations about “miracle” fuel-cell inventions (just needing that little extra bit of capital investment from you to become practical), or conspiracy stories about that secret gasoline pill the oil companies are supposed to have kept off the market.

Hey, maybe we’ll even get a revival of wind and solar power; so something good could come of this yet.

And if we’re really, REALLY lucky, perhaps those monster luxury SUVs will sooner or later become quaintly nostalgic but obsolete relics.

NEXT: Still more wacky new cable channels.

ELSEWHERE:

• Another site that condenses popular movies to their absurd essences….

I’VE LONG BELIEVED more modern-day American citizens would be fans of jazz music if they weren’t so aggressively ordered, from childhood on, that they MUST love it.

You know, that music-appreciation-class bluster about “American Classical Music” or “This Country’s Only Indigenous Art Form.”

That, alas, is the overriding spirit of Ken Burns’s PBS maxi-documentary Jazz, lumbering to its dubious close next Monday. (The last episode being the only one to cover anything done within many of our readers’ lifetimes.)

The whole 18-hour thing is sluggishly laden with the worst didactic balderdash in the stoic narration and the even stoic-er read quotations from old critics (drowning out every single instrumental band and solo segment and even many vocal clips).

Then there’s the structure, the storyline Burns built the show around. It’s all about Great Men (and a few Great Women), American heroes who overcame (for the black musicians) a racist society or (for the white musicians) conformist notions of social respectability. The swirling stew of influences and trends, of commercial thrusts and avant-garde parries, gets muted and confined by the restrictions of a narrative amenable to suburban middle-class parents (i.e., boring as hell to suburban middle-class kids).

One critic even compared Burns, in his pedestrian approach to the topic and his sports-hero depiction of jazz’s greats, to “Bob Costas with an NEA grant.”

But, this being an age when audiovisual entertainments can be as mutable and expansionist as the best jazz has always been, we don’t necessarily need to be stuck with Burns’s work in its current form. We can write in to PBS and demand a deluxe DVD version of the series.

The new on-camera interviews in Jazz are fun, so they could stay in this proposed special edition–as stand-alone clips accessible from the DVD Extras menu.

Similarly, the narrations and quotations should be shunted off to an optional audio track.

That leaves the heart of jazz, and of Jazz–the music itself.

This proposed special edition would contain all the tuneage of the series, with each song played to its full length. (That would require more of the beautiful old-movie footage and historic still photos (did anyone else notice the three-second shot of a Louis Armstrong marquee sign outside Seattle’s Showbox?), but Burns probably has those piled up to his reed hole.)

This version wouldn’t preach at people, especially kids and teens, about how important jazz is.

It would simply let them hear and see for themselves how great it is.

A Final Thought: Jazz, like all the really great American music and culture, had and has just about nothing to do with that stoic-middlebrow PBS-ian (or Ken Burns-ian) voice of mellow authority. Real jazz (like ragtime, western swing, swamp blues, Gospel, rockabilly, R&B, bluegrass, disco, Ramones-era punk, Melle Mel-era hiphop, etc. etc. etc.) is music of cultural mongrelization and cross-pollenization; of life and lust and passion; of pain and loss and joy and the will to go on.

That’s why the music will survive long after dumb TV shows about it have been deservedly forgotten.

NEXT: Should we pity poor Belltown yet?

ELSEWHERE:

• Mm! Mm! Haggis!…

FOR NEARLY A CENTURY NOW (actually longer if you consider the touring vaudeville circuits), the entertainment industry has been at the forefront of the drive to turn this mongrel assortment of conquered natives, ex-slaves, and immigrants from all over into One America.

A people of one language (American English), one cuisine (bland), one apparel style (the toned-down Sears knockoffs of the previous year’s couture), one politick (the narrow oscillation between “liberal” big-money stooges and “conservative” big-money stooges), and most especially one culture.

A culture defined by Top 40 music, Top 10 radio (and later television) shows, Republican newspapers, best-seller books, marketable celebrities, and especially by the movies.

As the other major media began to splinter into niches and sub-niches (secondary and tertiary cable channels, hate-talk and shock-talk radio, alterna-weeklies and local business papers, and this whole Web thang), the movie industry has held steadfast in its drive to mold and hold a single unified audience.

Every woman’s supposed to weep for Julia Roberts’s love life. Every man’s supposed to cheer at Schwarzenegger’s gunslining. Every child’s supposed to gaze in wonder at the Lion King’s antics. Not just across this continent but globally.

(The few established niche genres within the movie world (“indie” hip-violence fests, foreign “art” films, direct-to-video horror and porn) are exceptions that prove the rule.)

So it’s a small surprise to read from a card-carrying Hollywood-insider hype artist, longtime Variety editor Peter Bart, acknowledge recently that there’s no single American mass populace anymore.

The cause of Bart’s revelation? Not the changes within the non-movie entertainment milieu, but the Presidential election fiasco. The two big parties had so effectively thrusted and parried their target-marketing efforts that, by the time the statistical-dead-heat results came in, they’d forged equally-sized constituencies, each with strengths in different demographic sectors.

Bart fails to realize these political coalitions are at least partly group marriages of convenience. Many Bush voters aren’t really censor-loving, art-hating hix from the stix; just as many Gore voters aren’t really free-trade-loving, hiphop-hating corporate mandarins.

A better explanation of the U.S. political divide comes from the British Prospect magazine, by a writer who asserts that, even after all these years, the socio-cultural-political divide in America remains north-vs.-south. In his view the Democrats, once the party of Southern racists and Northern Irish Catholics, are now the party of “good government” New Englanders and sanctimonious whitebread Northwesterners. The Republicans, once the party of Wall Street princes and Illinois farmers, are now the party of good-old-boy Texas oil hustlers and sex-loathing South Carolina reactionaries.

(The essay’s writer says he doesn’t know how to classify the West, but I do: Us Nor’westers are Northerners first and Westerners second; while Calif. is run by a Southern doublefaced aesthetic of public moralism and private crony-corruption.)

But even these classifications are overly broad. They always have been, but are even more oversimplistic nowadays.

The American scene isn’t breaking down into two cultures, but dozens, even hundreds. The politicians know this, and are scrambling to keep their coalitions together. The movie business, apparently, doesn’t know this. Yet.

TOMORROW: Micosoft? Discriminatory? How can one think such a thing?

ELSEWHERE:

• A tribute to the roadside art of Chicago….

TODAY AND TOMORROW, some recent departures from the pop-cult scene, locally and nationally.

THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #1: The 211 Club pool hall abandoned its increasingly costly Belltown space after 16 years (following more than 40 years at its previous site where Benaroya Hall is now). It was something Belltown, and Seattle in general, is rapidly losing–a classy and unpretentious gathering place, a timeless and fadless site for serious playing without noise or capital-A Attitude.

THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #2: Montgomery Ward is closing its last 299 stores after 106 or so years in business. Most news articles about the closure claimed Wards had lost its market niche to newer chains like Wal-Mart and Target. But the roots of Wards’ decline go back many decades earlier, to its rule by a bullhorn company president named Sewell Avery.

In his prime, Avery brought color photography and modern graphic design to the Wards catalogs; and spearheaded the company’s expansion into retail stores.

But he became both dictatorial and senile. There’s a famous photo of him being forcibly carried out of his office in 1944 by Federal agents, because he’d refused to obey War Production Board quotas regarding the use of scarce materials for consumer goods.

In the postwar years Avery got even odder–he kept the retail stores at a uniform size and building style (two stories plus a basement and half-story mezzanine), small and unresponsive to local market conditions. Then he decided the catalog was too risque, and ordered that all women’s fashions except coats were to be photographed on dress forms, not live models or even mannequins.

By the time Wards’ board of directors finally had enough votes to oust Avery, the chain had become a distant competitor to Sears and Penney’s, and never caught up. It junked its “big book” catalog a decade before Sears did, and retreated from a national retail presence to a few select regions where it could afford to compete.

Even in some of those, such as Portland, it found itself shut out of major mall projects and had to build freestanding stores far from the peak car-traffic zones. Such companies as Mobil Oil and GE invested millions to keep Wards alive, but to no ultimate avail.

THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #3: Oldsmobile was America’s oldest car brand, but the General Motors top brass, in their infinite ignorance, didn’t know what to do with it. It had long ago become the odd leftover in GM’s grand market-segmentation strategies; it offered few models that weren’t renamed versions of other GM products.

Olds’s final end wasn’t a casualty of imports or SUVs, but an admission that GM couldn’t think of anything to do with it anymore.

THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #4: When KOMO-TV put up its grandiose new building, I was unaware the station was going to promptly demolish its old building. It was a beautiful work of postwar, post-Deco architecture.

At a garage sale once, I managed to obtain the big color brochure commemorating the building’s opening in ’46. That was still in the so-called Golden Age of Radio; but KOMO was already planning to expand into TV, and built its new broadcasting palace with that in mind. But the Truman Administration froze new TV licenses soon after KING-TV got on the air.

KOMO-TV had to wait until ’54 to start up. It got the local NBC affiliation, and within two years had the region’s first color cameras (one of which is now on display in the Lincoln-Mercury showroom up on Aurora). But then KING snatched the NBC franchise in ’59, leaving KOMO with ABC (whose market position then was comparable to UPN’s today).

All that history, and four decades’ worth more, were in the old building at Fourth and Denny. Boomerang, the local kiddie show hosted by former Hollywood voice-over singer Marni Nixon. Assorted Town Meetings and AM NWs and Northwest Afternoons. Keith Jackson’s first sportscasts. That still-harrowing film footage from a news photographer who got caught in the Mt. St. Helens ash storm.

All that’s left of the building are the memories, whatever tapes the station’s kept, and a small pile of rubble (which, admittedly, gave folks standing on Denny a better view of the Space Needle fireworks on 1/1).

TOMORROW: A few more sad tales of this type.

ELSEWHERE:

• The worst movies of 2001! (found by Fark)….
• The religious origins of bland American foods….

THE TRADITION CONTINUES: For the 15th consecutive year, here’s your fantastical MISCmedia In/Out List. Thanks to all who contributed suggestions.

As always, this list predicts what will become hot or not-so-hot over the course of the Year of HAL 9000; not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you think every person, place, thing, or trend that’s big now will just keep getting bigger forever, I’ve got some dot-com stocks to sell you.

(P.S.: Most every damned item on this list has a handy weblink. Spend the weekend clicking and having fun.)

NO COLUMN MONDAY, BUT ON TUESDAY: What you might see on this site in the year of Also Sprach Zarathustra.

ELSEWHERE:

• “If the music industry had its way, there’d be no such thing as a cassette player….”

BLACK ENTERTAINMENT TELEVISION was seldom among the proudest examples of African American cultural achievement.

Its schedule relied heavily on music-video blocks, including a lot of the gun-totin’ and woman-dissin’ gangsta minstrels manufactured by L.A. promoters for mall-rat consumption. Its original shows were heavy on the kind of self-deprecating comedy acts that Spike Lee savages in his new movie Bamboozled. And it ran as much as 12 hours a day of infomercials.

But black audiences were often willing to give the channel at least a little grudging respect, because it was “their own.” It was officially owned by a black entrepreneur, Robert Johnson. (Even though its financing and ultimate control came from TCI’s Liberty Media subsidiary.)

But AT&T, which now controls Liberty, has been involved in some major corporate reorganizing; while Johnson’s tried to start a new commuter airline.

So BET will soon disappear as a nominally independent entity, to become just another of Viacom’s many cable properties.

Some commentators have mourned that the only black-owned national TV channel’s going to be just another piece of a media conglomerate.

What they’re not fully considering is that a Viacom-owned BET just might be a more effective voice for black America. Not just with more and costlier original shows, but with a more respectful atittude toward its core audience.

Viacom’s MTV and UPN channels have certainly traded in the kind of jive talk and booty shakes vilified by BET’s critics. But its Showtime pay-TV channel has commissioned perhaps the most respectful black-middle-class show since Cosby, Soul Food (and its Hispanic counterpart, Resurrection Boulevard).

These shows, along with HBO’s The Corner, expand the notion of “TV Worth Paying For.” Those with just plain old broadcast reception get Af-Am role models limited to over-the-top sitcom mugging and Oprah. Those with basic cable can also see Li’l Kim’s cleavage, Wyclef’s loverboy posturing, and CNN’s Bernard Shaw.

But for the adventures of more-or-less ordinary black families with more-or-less ordinary relationship and career problems, ya gotta pay extra.

Maybe, just maybe, that’ll change.

TOMORROW: Bjork’s dander in the dark.

REMEMBER: It’s time to compile the highly awaited MISCmedia In/Out List for 2001. Make your nominations to clark@speakeasy.org or on our handy MISCtalk discussion boards.

ELSEWHERE:

• One person’s choice of the all-time worst classical record covers….

Generation S&M, Part 2

by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn

(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist began musing about the ’90s revival of bondage fetishism in pop culture, and some of its possible sources. Her conclusion: A generation had come of age after growing up with Catwoman and Emma Peel.)

MY GENERATION was the first generation raised in front of the television.

Suddenly there were shows geared just towards us. Our moms bought us the new TV dinners, then set us in front of the tube while they went to their ESP development class.

And it wasn’t just The Partridge Family and Leave It to Beaver reruns we ate with breakfast, lunch, and dinner too. We’re talking some pretty heavy sexual-revolution morsels from the ’60s. Things even too risque for today’s TV.

I’m talking Catwoman, in full dominitrix gear, playfully torturing Batman. Sure, she was evil, but she was sort of doing Batman a favor by punishing him. I was five and I understood that.

Then there was I Dream of Jeannie, a scantily clad Barbara Eden dressed like a Turkish concubine who called a guy “Master.” (Impossible on today’s television.)

On Bewitched, Samantha was cheesily nice, but did you ever catch her evil twin sister Serena, the dominitrix? Between changing Darren into various livestock, she always had something vicious to say to her sister and just about anyone else around.

Emma Peel, in tight leather, karate-chopped men and always had the upper hand on Steed.

These were the women who raised me while my mom was at work. Me and my friends couldn’t swear by oath because it was against our religion, so we would say, “Do you swear to Catwoman?” If you lied on that one, we all knew you would go straight to hell.

In the ’70s, suddenly schools couldn’t make us cut our hair, pray or even insist we pledge allegiance to the flag. Just when we wanted Catwoman for a teacher, gone was the enticing restraint of the ’50s. All that work from the women’s libbers paid off, too; they couldn’t stop us from joining the army, cutting our hair, wearing pants and completely desexing ourselves.

We could do anything we wanted, and boy were we bored.

Our parents were all divorced and “finding themselves,” repeating Stuart Smalley-type self-affirmation mantras in the bathroom mirror, or smoking a joint; so they were too busy to give us any discipline.

In rebellion, my classmates starting getting born-again all over the place, finding the rigid moral confines of the fundamentalist church comforting.

In comparison, punk rock and S&M were sane alternatives. Not only did S&M give us something to bounce off of for once, but it made sex illicit, exciting, unnatural, and deviant. We could finally get that disapproving look from our society that we had waited for all those years.

The end of S&M as we know it: Now, of course, it is not so risque to be a dominitrix. it’s no longer considered deviant. In fact they even have advocacy groups and support groups.

In the ’80s, as a sociology student, I watched a “sexual deviancy” film. There was the prostitute, the nymphomaniac, the transsexual etc., and of course, the dominatrix. She was pitifully tame. Nowadays they would have to take her out of the film.

And the ’70s have come back into style–not only clothes-wise, but suddenly the 20-year-olds stopped wearing makeup and everyone thinks they have ESP or are a witch. N’Sync and the Backstreet Boys are singing some really sugary-sweet stuff that is as barfable as Barry Manilow. Madonna traded in her tight leather corsets for that flowy polyester look.

Sex looks boring again; or at least I wouldn’t find it enticing to do the dirty with the anorexic, bell-bottom-wearing, self-loving, and self-affirming teenyboppers out there. I mean, do Ricky Martin and Matt Damon really look at all dangerous?

I guess I will just have to wait 20 years or so to have any fun.

Or maybe I’ll just ignore that S&M is no longer chic.

That would be SO Catwoman of me!

TOMORROW: A blowhard gets his comeuppance and refuses to admit it.

REMEMBER: It’s time to compile the highly awaited MISCmedia In/Out List for 2001. Make your nominations to clark@speakeasy.org or on our handy MISCtalk discussion boards.

IN OTHER NEWS: The three U.S. news magazines often share the same cover-story topic, but rarely have Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report all used the exact same cover image, with two of the three using the same banner headline.

ELSEWHERE:

• Could that most Web-user-beloved of humor institutions (and former home of many of the original Stranger staff) be selling out?…
• The NY Times marks seven years after the WWW became an established institution (which, in the paper’s estimation, was when the NY Times first reported on it)….

Generation S&M, Part 1

by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn

THE OTHER DAY I was surprised to see a preview to the new movie Quills, a tale loosely based on facts about the Marquis de Sade.

Surprised because I thought that S&M was out. The movie is complete with a star-studded Hollywood cast and lots of flogging.

Some fads go out slowly, occasionally bobbing their heads aggressively before drowning completely. You can’t really write a fair essay about a fad until it’s over. You have to give it time to die, and God knows you don’t know a fad is happening while you’re in it. No one knew the roaring ’20s were roaring until at least the ’50s.

So it’s stupid for me to reminisce about S&M and the glorious late ’90s yet, but I’m doing it anyway.

S&M made a comeback in the early ’90s. I heard someone once say that Seattle was some sort of Centre de Sadism renowned throughout the world. I don’t really think so.

I mean, of course there was the Vogue, which started having Sunday fetish nights in the nineties. Then the Catwalk, where you could playfully whip boys in leather, a few underground S&M raves that were hard to avoid if you ever danced.

There was even a more serious bordello/dungeon of sorts in Magnolia. The torturous Jim Rose Circus Side Show and The Pleasure Elite originated here. Still, I never thought of Seattle as an epicenter for S&M.

I did notice that suddenly S&M was cool. People were wearing corsets and spiked heels and dog collars again and suddenly black rubber was everywhere. People were “coming out” about their sexual strangeness. The personals started being really entertaining with all the weird fetishes. Post-grunge fashion picked up on the trend.

The S&M love story by Anne Rice, Exit to Eden, was made into a (crappy) Hollywood movie. Xena: Warrior Princess started kicking the shit out of men; as did Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Catwoman, and Lara Croft the cyberbabe.

Obvious dominitrixes like Miss Parker of The Profiler came back to TV. The Gimp appeared in Pulp Fiction; vampires made a comeback; Clinton was elected (and everyone knows he’s a bottom).

When you write an essay about a fad, like for example the slew of Vietnam movies made in the late ’80s or the preppy movement of the early ’80s, or even anorexia nervosa, you have to say what were the factors that allowed the fad to be.

Like for example, a lot of preppy kids had these cool ex-hippie, pro-pot, pro-everything parents, and the only way suitable for them to rebel was to change their name to Buffy and buy stocks and iron their clothes. Works for me.

Much the same thing happened with S&M.

Everyone knows that our parents raised us in the ’70s and they were into the most hideous, revolting, normal sex.

Encounter groups, est, Unitarian Church Singles Groups (called USAG). I’m OK, You’re OK. The Show Me! book, the anatomically correct dolls. The ’70s, when people sang “I’m Easy” and “Sometimes When We Touch” with a straight face.

Yeeech. Blek.

Our parents’ sex, although “open” and “free”, bored us all to tears. I mean, Alan Alda and Woody Allen as sex symbols?

While their twenties were spent rebelling against the sexual repression of their ’50s-era parents, our twenties were spent trying to re-achieve the coolness of repression.

And I think I personally found it in Catwoman.

TOMORROW: A possible source of S&M fascination–’60s sitcoms.

REMEMBER: It’s time to compile the highly awaited MISCmedia In/Out List for 2001. Make your nominations to clark@speakeasy.org or on our handy MISCtalk discussion boards.

ELSEWHERE:

• No products, no employees, no customers, no business plans; nothing but domain names for sale on eBay, all promising smash revenues…

IN A SHORT-SHORT FICTION PIECE I haven’t uploaded to this site yet, I once imagined some potential Playboy magazine nudie features of the future: “America’s Sexiest Female CEOs,” “America’s Sexiest Female Judges,” “America’s Sexiest Congresswomen,” etc.

One I skipped: “America’s Sexiest Anchorwomen.”

It’s an odd omission. TV stations and networks have been hiring pretty ladies to share anchor desks with hairspray boys for decades. (One of Seattle’s most memorable, Sandy Hill, was an ex-Miss Washington who wound up co-hosting every newscast on the station from noon to 11 pm, before becoming Joan Lunden’s predecessor on Good Morning America.)

All this talk is a lead-in to discussing a peculiar softcore-fetish website, The Naked News.

It’s a 15-minute streaming video newscast, with a new edition each weekday. While it has no field reporters or on-the-scene footage, its four Toronto-based studio anchors read competently-written briefs headlining the day’s news, weather, and sports.

All the anchors are young women. All of them either appear on camera fully nude, or strip from dress-for-success outfits until they’re wearing only their microphones.

The concept’s borrowed from a Russian program that appears on regular TV over there. That show’s bare news readers have occasionally even staged (nude) on-location interviews with (clothed) major government officials.

The American Naked News anchors all keep straight, tho’ perky, faces during their readings. Their only variation from standard newsreader behavior is a short rump-wiggling walkoff at the conclusion of their segments. Their faces, hair styles, and (when they have any) costumes are standard-issue anchorwoman style, not stripper or porn-star or dominatrix style. If not for their perfect (perhaps surgically perfected) figures, they could be the sort of women a young-adult male Internet user might work alongside–or for.

Their straightforward demeanor also differentiates The Naked News from the constant, screeching hard-sell tactics common to sex sites. The streaming video contains commercials, but they’re relatively tame ones (for other entertainment websites). The site’s lack of constant selling is just as relieving as its lack of hardcore crudeness.

None of this means many female Net users would enjoy viewing The Naked News, or even approve of its existence.

The site’s stars might be pronounced non-bimbos, and they might project in-charge images, but they’re still portraying male fantasies, performing to be stared at.

To such potential critics, I might say that heterosexuality has always been with us and likely always will be. As long as most het-male brains are wired to respond to visual stimuli, such stimuli will be produced. They might as well be stimuli that emphasize beauty over crudity, with at least a modicum of brains and humor and friendliness.

And while The Naked News may be a trifle, a light-entertainment novelty work, it’s really no more entertainment-oriented than many news and “reality” shows on broadcast TV. (And it’s no less journalistically respectable than some of them either.)

IN OTHER NEWS: The first strikebound editions of the Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer came out yesterday. They’re flimsy li’l 24-page things, full of wire copy, syndicated columns, and database features (weather, TV listings).

Because they were printed even earlier in the day than Tuesday’s last pre-strike papers, they didn’t include any evening sports results, stock listings, or even the Florida Supreme Court’s Presidential-recount ruling. Classified ads were truncated on a quota basis, unseen since the days of WWII paper rationing.

The result: Morning papers you didn’t need all day to read. A partial vindication for my long-held wish for a brisker, more immediate, even “alternative” daily; the sort of concept that could potentially bring true competition to the print-news biz and dislodge the local-monopoly papers such as those currently being struck.

(More strike news, and new material by picketing newshacks, is at The Seattle Union Record.

IN OTHER OTHER NEWS: George Clark, who’s self-published several occasional parodies of The Stranger and The Weekly over the years (so typographically accurate, many readers originally thought the Stranger staff had actually produced them!), has issued another, spoofing both tabloids in a double-cover format. The issue seems to have been in the works for some time; it contains parodies of features The Stranger hasn’t carried for two years or more (including my old section, cutely relabeled “Miscellanal”).

TOMORROW: Some things I actually like.

ELSEWHERE:

• Remember the Joan Rivers movie Rabbit Test? Or the feminist bumper stickers, “If men could get pregnant….” Well, one man claims he is!…

THERE’S FINALLY A TARGET STORE in Seattle. The chain had previously dotted the suburbs, but came no closer to town than Westwood Village, a strip mall on the cusp between West Seattle and White Center.

Now, the “hip” discount department store (which has encouraged its fans to use the faux-French designation “Tar-szhay”) has set up shop in a new development across from Northgate–the historic “Mall That Started It All” where, 50 years ago, the then-parent company of the Bon Marche devised a centralized, all-enveloping shopping experience, separated by a giant moat of parking lots from the outside world.

In contrast, the new Northgate North development, where Target is, was planned in cooperation with city officials who wanted an “urban village” scheme–higher-density development, with leftover space for new residential units.

Therefore, the new Target’s 80,000 square feet (the chain’s standard store size) are cut up into two floors of a building that directly abuts the sidewalk (though you have to enter from the back, next to the five-story parking garage). Target’s on the building’s upper two floors. The ground floor’s devoted to smaller chains with storefront entrances (not open yet). On the lower level: Best Buy, the electronics/appliance/CD chain that once ran a national TV ad promoting itself as the best place to catch up on that then-hot “Seattle Sound,” even though it didn’t have any outlets in the area at the time.

The building itself’s done up in that currently popular retro-“industrial” style. Lotsa exposed framework and corrugated aluminum cladding give off a “busy” and quasi-friendly look, rather than the overpowering nothingness of big blank concrete walls.

The Target store was worth the wait, and suggests the chain should’ve built in-town sooner. While Kmart constructed its merchandising for suburban squares, and Wal-Mart was devised to be Small Town America’s everything-for-everybody store, Target applied niche marketing (also known as “target marketing”) to what had been a mass-marketing genre. Like Ikea, it sought out young-adult singles and new families with more style than cash. From shoes to lingerie, from kids’ coats to tableware, from home-office furniture to home-entertainment centers, what Target’s got is at least a little cooler (and not much costlier) than the stuff at the other big-box chains.

This strategy dates to the chain’s origins. As the chain’s website notes, it’s the only national discount chain to have been started by “department store people, not dime store people.” Specifically, it was started by Dayton Hudson Co., owners of Dayton’s dept. store in Minneapolis (where Mary Tyler Moore flung her hat). Target has now become more important to Dayton Hudson than its collection of regional dept.-store chains; the parent company recently changed its official name to Target Corp. When family scion Mark Dayton won a U.S. Senate election this month, most commentators referred to him as “heir to the Target fortune.”

Indeed, the brand’s become so powerful that the company was able to run commercials earlier this year with rave DJs and hot-panted dancers cavorting around backdrops of the chain’s bull’s-eye logo, with no products being sold and the store’s name not even mentioned.

TOMORROW: Another of our little fiction pieces.

IN OTHER NEWS: There’s a movie out there this week with a supposed anti-materialism message, that has lots of merchandising tie-ins with Nabisco, Hasbro, Visa, the Post Office, and more. Here’s a review, in Seussesque verse.

ELSEWHERE:

• The unsung story of Canadian comic heroes!…
• A bizarre, but actual, dumb comic-book cover every day (found by Boing Boing)….

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.

ELSEWHERE:

• Whack-a-President-elect wannabe….