Saturday, October 19, 2002

THIS IS A FEW MONTHS OLD, but Rupert Murdoch's rabid-right UK tabloids have practiced a time-worn way to dismiss political opposition: treat it as a mere fashion fad. Hence, a pictorial on how to dress up just like a hip young anarchist.

posted by clark 11:49 AM

Thursday, October 17, 2002

THE SPECTER (or should I say "spectre"?) of media consolidation continues abroad.

Last year, we praised Britain's ITV network for its heritage of decentralized and impermanent authority. Historically, ITV was "owned" by a regulatory commission, which licensed local network-affiliate stations for multi-year contracts that weren't always renewed. The local stations produced the shows and sold the ads, under the regulator's heavy guidelines. The bigger-market stations (including the two that split the London franchise by days of the week) had more opportunities to put shows into the network schedule. But no one company controlled the network or its schedule.

The result was a diffuse system with different "voices" and different ideas on what would make a good and/or popular show. It brought forth countless small-screen classics; including Coronation Street, The Avengers, Ready Steady Go!, The Saint, Thunderbirds, The Prisoner, The Muppet Show, This Is Tom Jones, Upstairs Downstairs, Benny Hill, Danger Mouse, Brideshead Revisited, Inspector Morse, and the original versions of Three's Company and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. That all began to change in the Thatcher years. The 11 ITV stations in England and Wales got bought up by two companies. Now those two are merging, forming a behemoth that will control half the UK's TV ad revenues--at least until "synergy"-obsessed mismanagement drives more viewers to other broadcast, cable, and satellite outlets.

By the way, if you click on the above link and you live in the US or Canada, you're commiting some kind of intellectual-property crime. To which I naturally say go for it. (Another item about the story is at this link.)

posted by clark 2:15 AM

posted by clark 1:43 AM

Monday, October 14, 2002

IT'S BEEN A BRUTAL COUPLE-O-DAYS for all good Seattle pro sport fans. The Seahawks predictably lost on Monday Night Football. As part of the show, ABC paid to have its logo painted onto the infield of an empty Safeco Field, a painful reminder of the Mariners' failure to make the baseball postseason. That failure has prompted M's manager Lou Piniella, catalyst of everything the team's ever accomplished, to quit. And the team that snuck ahead of the M's to win the AL Wild Card slot won the league penant, setting up an (ugh! double ugh!) all-California World Series.

posted by clark 11:33 PM

UNLIKE APPARENTLY MANY OF YOU, I still believe in reading local newspapers. Sure, the NY Times has lotsa pretty real-estate ads for fantasy palatial mansions, but there's still tons to be said for reading up about your own place.

There's also the fun tea-leaf-gazing ritual of discerning what gets into the paper and why. F'rinstance, the Sunday SeaTimes's virulent anti-monorail editorial and the accompanying, heavily inane, editorial cartoon by the paper's new staff art-hack Eric Devericks. Devericks, like his P-I counterpart David Horsey, can be sort-of amusing when attacking some targets, but astoundingly unfunny and uncreative when called upon to visualize an editorial stance dictated by the publisher, who in turn probably got his marching orders from the Downtown Seattle Association and/or Washington Alliance for Business.

In this case, Devericks's drawing portrays a quartet (actual) nuts, spouting the anti-monorail campaign's shameless distortions of the pro-monorail campaign's arguments. Being mere nuts, they have no facial expressions or body language. There's no personality, no artistry, not even any vitriol.

The Oregonian once had an even duller cartoonist, an old guy with the perfectly geezeroid name of Art Bimrose. His idea of illustrating an idea was invariably to depict a seersucker-suited guy pointing to a newspaper headline and either smiling or frowning.

But Bimrose was consistently dull, day after day. Horsey and Devericks are selectively mediocre. When they draw a dud, you can be fairly sure they're following orders—even, just perhaps, attempting to sabotage their assigned opinions by depicting them as opinions with which only a witless geezer would agree.

Elsewhere in that same edition, human-interest columnist Jerry Large ran selected, edited letters responding to a prior piece of his, which pondered whether Seattle was a good place for African-Americans to move to.

Large cleverly didn't ask whether the town was merely "tolerant of diversity," a phrase which usually refers to upscale white people's images of their own smug perfection. No, Large wanted to hear from actual black people about their own actual experiences across the whole spectrum of life's needs (love, career, family, community, finding a decent BBQ place, etc.).

Either by his own drive to be fair-n'-balanced or by his editors' wish to preserve the "tolerant" civic image, Large made sure to include several letters from people who liked it here. These letters tended to list safe, "tolerance"-type reasons. The negative letters were more passionate. Their arguments tended toward a few main areas:

• The "this town completely sucks, man" argument I often hear from white art-hacks, and which I've attempted to refute prevously;

• the "where's the rest of me?" argument, bemoaning the relative paucity of Af-Am individuals and related community institutions in a town with more Asians than blacks; and

• the "what tolerance?" argument, referencing icy social receptions, public stares, and racist remarks. (Trigger-happy cops weren't mentioned in the letters Large chose to print.)

In my prior refutation of white "this town sucks" whiners, I'd said Seattle indeed is a real city, with lots to offer. But it'd have even more to offer with more Af-Ams around, what with all their immeasurable-contributions-to-the-American-milieu etc. etc.

For those Af-Ams reading this (and I know at least a few are), please consider becoming part of our city. We're northern but not freezingly so. We've only got two or three indirect-race-baiting politicians, none of whom currently hold elective office. We're awfully white, but not in a Boondocks extreme. You can find hiphop recordings here (though it is easier to find stores selling obscure German techno CDs). We've got our gosh-durn own African Heritage festivals, breakdancing contests, and typo-abundant black newspapers. While our local economy's become the nation's worst, there's a new source of minority venture capital in the form of families who sold their city houses to rich white people at the peak of the market.

And all my dorky white brethern & cistern can do more to be fully welcoming toward (not just "tolerant" of) these neighbors. A good place to start is to start realizing black people aren't always like what white people think they're like (so leave those stereotypes behind). If you're an employer, start hiring some (and not just as janitors and receptionists). And don't think you'll automatically become their friend if you start acting like some dorky white person pretending to be black. Just be the most honest, life-loving, gracious dorky white person you can be.

posted by clark 2:33 AM

Sunday, October 13, 2002

WE'RE NOT REALLY POETRY PEOPLE HERE, but can't help admire UW prof Richard Kenny's versified thoughts about the "timorous Congress" acceding to war-fever.

posted by clark 1:55 PM

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