Saturday, July 07, 2001

FAN BELTS: The aforementioned National Peanut Tour van, spotted at Myrtle Edwards Park on the Fourth, is now parked outside the Stadium Exhibition Center as part of the hoopla surrounding the All-Star Fan Fest. Also parked outside the Ex Center, and thus free of charge this weekend:

• Bud World, "The Ultimate Budweiser Experience." You spend fifteen minutes watching a big-screen video about how wonderful Budweiser beer and the people who make it are; then you spend another fifteen minutes listening to a brewery representative talk about the beermaking process. At the end you get a credit-card style certificate naming you as an Official Beer Master. (All you get to drink there, however, is their new 180 energy drink, which tastes just like Coca-Cola's old OK Soda.)

• The Jetsons Home Tour, sponsored by Century 21 Real Estate. Watch computer-animated visions of the Jetsons animated universe while a full-size Rosie the Robot doll tells you why you should buy George and Jane Jetson's Sky City condo. Watch a "food replicator" create computer-animated cookies while cookie smells envelope the room (really a van).

As for the Fan Fest itself, it's basically an exercise in letting area citizens imagine they're a part of the All-Star Game experience, even though the game itself offerred only a few, mightily expensive, tickets on the local market.

The Fan Fest is a disappointing $15 extravaganza of baseball-card sales booths, apparel and merchandise sales, kids' games, autograph line-ups, and sponsor-logo banners. The only really good parts are three historical displays: One on the Negro Leagues, one on 100 years of minor-league baseball, and one on Seattle baseball history. The latter, curated by local baseball historian extraordinaire Dave Eskanazi, is almost worth the price of admission alone.

posted by clark 12:41 AM

Thursday, July 05, 2001

GOING FOURTH: Submitted for your approval (can't help it, I saw five hours Sci-Fi's Twilight Zone marathon yesterday), some images from the Fourth of Jul-Ivar's.

Thanks to decent weather for the first time in the past ten 7/4s, the crowds at Myrtle Edwards Park (not to mention the sailboats and yachts just offshore) were even larger and swarmier.

What they saw and experienced: The usual all-white boogie blooze bands, the usual curly fries and kettle corn, the usual vintage-aircraft flybys, a strange promotional touring-van exhibit called "The National Peanut Tour," a woman in a Bugs Bunny suit handing out samples of banana flavored milk to the kiddies, and a 50-foot inflatable figure of a cartoony bodybuilder guy bearing the name "Ironman."

Then, just after 10 (well after the kids had gotten pooped and suburned while the adults had gotten drunk and hazy), came the big blast-o-rooney (seen here from upper Queen Anne).

In short, a perfect normal Fourth; a holiday almost completely free of any patriotic or other official reason for its existence other than the universal need to gather and see stuff blow up. A ritual of lowbrow mechanized "fun" every nation oughta have at midsummer, under one excuse or another.

ELSEWHERE:

Can anyone or anything stop the major labels' legal putsch to stop Internet music?

The old joke is that the British created such beautiful dinnerware in order to distract attention away from British food. Yet the U.S. holds enough expatriates and Anglophiles for several companies, including "Expatboxes.com," to specialize in importing hard-to-find Brit packaged food products, from Marmite yeast spread to McVitie's Digestive Biscuits and Heinz treacle sponge pudding.

posted by clark 2:28 PM

Tuesday, July 03, 2001

FURTHER AUGMENTATIONS: Now we know why Playboy TV reinvented itself with raunch-talk and porn-queen celebrity profiles, as noted in the previous item.

Turns out the channel's been clobbered in subscription enrollment and cable-system carriage, first by the censored hardcore porn of the Spice Channel (which Playboy bought) and then by the more minimally censored hardcore porn of the Hot Network (which Playboy chose not to take over at the time of the Spice acquisition, but is buying now). When it comes to costly and unsatisfying 2-D substitutes for actual sex, the lonely-guy audience of America prefers the lewd 'n' crude over the comparatively soft and feminine.

Then there's the phallus factor. AT&T Broadband can get away with charging $2 more for a Hot Network pay-per-view feature than for the slightly more discreet edit of the same production on Playboy or Spice. That's because enough officially-hetero men crave the sight of other men's parts in action.

A year or two ago I thought this portended some great change in men's attitudes toward other men's bodies, and might eventually lead to a more gender-equitable, less homophobic society. Now I don't know if it means anything.

posted by clark 5:22 PM

AUGMENTATIONS: Saw a day's worth of Playboy TV the other week, for the first time since '94.

Back then, the channel presented a hermetically-sealed fantasy world built around the parent magazine's carefully-crafted Playmate stock character--slickly "beautiful," bereft of imperfection or personality, a supremely non-threatening ideal for post-adolescent readers lacking in sexual self-confidence. The magazine's cable operation carried over this fleshless flesh and passionless eroticism, as best as its budget allowed, with a low-key, "friedly" lineup of centerfold videos and softcore movies.

That's all changed. The channel now apparently wants to be as raunchy as possible without unduly tarnishing the Playboy brand image or jeopardizing its relationship with the cable companies that carry it. So it now carries "celebrity profiles" of porn stars (complete with lightly censored scenes from their works), travelogues to lap-dance clubs, and call-in shows in which the male callers talk lewd-'n'-crude to nude female hosts showing off what they coyly call their "meat wallets." Even the centerfold videos, which used to strictly show the models cavorting alone in pastoral settings, now feature them in soft-focus fake sex scenes.

Today's Playboy TV is as dumb as yesterday's, but in different ways. The old Playboy TV was almost numbingly bland. The new Playboy TV is a hackneyed visualization of some of shock-talk radio's worst cliches, especially in the overabundance of capital-A Attitude.

But it's also got an energy the old Playboy TV never had, an enthusiasm about itself and its primary topic. The fantasy world depicted by the new Playboy TV is one in which everybody (with the possible exception of you) is having outrageous, consensual, mutually gratifying, sweat-inducing sex just about all the time; sex that never, ever leads to STDs, unwanted pregnancies, or emotional relationship turmoil.

It's a fantasy based on a different ideal of sexiness--not the soft-smiling, reassuring traditional Playmate image but the sassy, perky strip-club or porn-video goddess, a woman who might superficially look like a bimbo but who's clearly focused and determined, bearing an unstoppable drive to sell, sell, sell.

A perfect sex-symbol depiction for the age of hyper-marketing.

(This article's permanent link)

posted by clark 1:39 AM

THE FINE PRINT (on a package of Nestle's Toll House cookie dough): "Bake cookie dough before consuming."

ELSEWHERE: When a dot-com manages to stay in business and even attract new investors, it's news, apparently.

posted by clark 1:30 AM

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