Friday, February 28, 2003

HERE'S THE BEST Mister Rogers tribute I could find online, at the Emmy Awards site. But even it excludes some important facts about Rogers's lifetime accomplishment:

• Rogers's show, along with its mirror-opposite Sesame Street, are the two PBS shows still around from the days of the network's even-more-underfunded precursor, National Educational Television. Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (originally MisteRogers' Neighborhood) was far closer than the slicked-up Street to NET's old homespun/threadbare aesthetic. Neighborhood's opening/closing miniature street scene once started and ended on a model of NET's house-and-antenna logo.

• Different Rogers obits give different dates for Neighborhood's debut. That's because it launched quietly in '65 on an even smaller station hookup, the Eastern Educational Network. It went national on NET in ’68, just one year before the bigger and noisier Sesame Street launched.

• Sesame Street was a thorough product of the bureaucracy that would become PBS. It was written by committees, from "lesson plans" devised in other committees. It employed the cream of the New York ad-production community, including Jim Henson. It utilized all the latest tricks of video, film, and animation; particularly that newfangled toy called electronic videotape editing that had made Laugh-In and Hee Haw feasible.

  Rogers's show, in contrast, was shot on a small stage in Pittsburgh. It was paced by Rogers's gentle speech mannerisms and jazz pianist John Costa's tinkly syncopations. On many if not most episodes, they stopped the tape only during the transitions between the human and puppet scenes.

• Rogers's easygoing yet careful attitude extended to the show's production. He ground out 130 episodes (writing all the scripts and songs) for the show's first NET season. Another 330 were produced over the next seven years. (These early episodes haven't been rerun in a long time.) Then in 1975 he stopped, to pursue other kid-advocacy ventures. Four years later he donned the sweater again, producing only an average of 20 shows a year for the next 22 years. (And you thought Johnny Carson's last years were rerun-heavy.)

  He didn't need to be locked in the studio week in and week out. His deliberately-squaresville schtick was timeless (the only big change was that the shows' life-lesson aspects became preachier in the latter seasons). There are always kids, and they more or less always face the same questions and problems.

• Except on the soaps, nobody played the same "role" on TV longer than Rogers. His very survival, as a voice of sanity in a kiddie-media landscape which (even when he began) had always been predicated on frenetic action, is a sign that you don't have to be the biggest or loudest or cutest kid to make it in the world.

posted by clark 1:22 AM

Thursday, February 27, 2003

OUR BIG NEW PHOTO SHOW, City Light, City Dark, has been moved to the Nico Gallery, 619 Western Avenue, Second Floor (one door down from the previously advertised location). It still opens next Thursday evening, March 6, 6-8 p.m.

The exhibit features grouped pairs of images depicting similar subjects. One photo in each pair is set in the tourists' Seattle of sunny days and mellow smiles. The other photo takes place in the "other" Seattle of low overcasts, long nights, and defiant nightlife.

Be there. Aloha.

posted by clark 12:29 AM

I WAS ASKED to mention the passing last week of Maurice Blanchot, 95, a hi-brow French novelist and critic. I don't include much writing-about-writing on this site, but here's something Blanchot once wrote in that vein:

"Writing is a fearful spiritual weapon that negates the naive existence of what it names and must therefore do the same to itself. Literature runs the danger of denying its own desire for presence, although it cannot become anything else, philosophy for example. Hence writing is a self-disturbed activity: it knows itself to be, at once, trivial and apocalyptic, vain yet of the greatest consciousness-altering potential....

"It seems comical and miserable that in order to manifest itself, dread, which opens and closes the sky, needs the activity of a writer sitting at their table and forming letters on a piece of paper."

posted by clark 12:02 AM

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