Thursday, May 08, 2003

IF YOU BELIEVE a certain right-wing opinion site (and we usually don't), a few prominent religious-right leaders feel the Bush regime still is't repressive enough, and might threaten to either form a breakaway party in '04 or simply give less than enthusiastic support to Republican candidates.

Comment #1: Any divisive rift that might break the Sleaze Machine's stranglehold would be welcomed from this corner.

Comment #2: It wouldn't, however, be the complete collapse of American demagoguery for which I've longed.

posted by clark 1:15 PM

LET THIS BE THE FIRST CORNER to express sympathy and support for Mike Price, the former Washington State football coach who scored the prestigious U of Alabama head-coaching gig, then got fired before his first game after he spent one orgiastic weekend in Pensacola FL with strippers and/or hookers.

That's just the sort of behavior adored by the guyz on The Best Damn Sports Show Period (and by student-athletes themselves), but so heavily loathed by the powers-that-be in Bama. You know, the state that still flies a variant on the Confederate battle flag, and in which dildos are still illegal.

Far from being vilified for his victimless transgressions, Price should be lauded as a freedom fighter against conservative hypocrisy.

posted by clark 12:01 PM

JOSEPH P. KAHN TRIES TO EXPLAIN the rash of movie and product names starting with the letter "X." No, it's not so they'll be listed first in reverse alphabetical order.

AS IF YOU HAVEN'T GUESSED IT, there've apparently been no big mass-destrux weapons caches in Iraq. Saddam really was only a threat to his own people.

THE MAJOR RECORD LABELS are rumored to be commissioning virus-type software programs that'd be posted within, or under the titles of, online music files, in order to instill fear into the hearts of MP3 traders. I'm old enough to vaguely remember when the record co.'s claimed to be rebels, or at least friendly vendors of rebellious attitudes. Today's music monoliths might market one-dimensional celeb images of bad boys and naughty girls, but that's no more "rebellious" than the sight of Republican politicians on Harleys.

TODAY WE BEGIN a new occasional photo series, Space Available, depicting some of the once-productive retail and office real estate currently made redundant by today's economic collapse.

posted by clark 11:07 AM

Tuesday, May 06, 2003

DON'T STOP THE PRESSES: I've freelanced in the past for the Seattle Times, and hope to do so again. But that doesn't mean I want it to succeed at its current drive to become a true monopoly paper.

I opposed the original joint operating agreement between the Times and the Post-Intelligencer, which took effect 20 years ago this month. Unlike the JOAs in some two-paper towns, which set up a joint-venture agency to handle the papers' non-news operations (sales, printing, distro, promotion, etc.), the Seattle JOA put both papers' fates squarely under the Times' control. The Times was free to undersell the P-I to subscribers and advertisers alike, or to be laggardly about trucking the P-I off to outlying corners of the region. All of which it's been accused of doing at one time or another.

The 1999 revision to the JOA only increased the Times' capacity for mischief. When the World Wide Web came along, the Times ruled that a P-I website would fall under the promotional duties ascribed under the original JOA's terms to the Times. In other words, the Times got to choose what kind of website the P-I could have, and naturally chose a bare-bones PR page without any actual news items. In return for the right to put its full text online (and a slightly higher share of the JOA's proceeds), the P-I agreed to a revised JOA that would allow the Times to (1) come out in the morning, and (2) invoke an escape clause should it report three consecutive money-losing years.

The latter clause, in retrospect, was a lot like the escape clause former Mariners owner George Argyros demanded from King County in the mid-'80s. Argyros claimed, and the Times and P-I editorially agreed, that the only way to keep the M's in Seattle was to rewrite the team's Kingdome lease so Argyros could more easily move the team to Tampa. (Really!) Argyros got his new lease, then promptly attempted to invoke his bug-out option at his first contractual opportunity; the team's future wasn't secured until the 1992 sale to the Nintendo-led group that still owns it today.

Similarly, the Times took an agreement that was ostensibly meant to keep both papers in business, and has reconfigured, interpreted, and exploited it in order to try to kill the P-I. The Hearst Corp., which has owned the P-I since 1921 while allowing so many of its other once-mighty dailies to die over the decades, is taking the whole mess to court.

It could end up in any number of ways. Times bossman Frank Blethen says he wants the Times to emerge alone from the fray, and he insists it'll do so with his family still in charge. But there could conceivably also be a full merger of the papers into one lumbering goliath, or a Hearst buyout of the Times.

What nobody's openly considering is a return to full competition, with Hearst or some future P-I owner amassing a separate load of presses, trucks, and ad sellers.

But that's what I'd like to see.

It'd be a perfect opportunity to try and re-invent daily newspapers for the Internet age, when the tiny-print items that have continued to make dailies essential for urban society are more handily available online (movie times, stock prices, sports stats, want ads). In the TV age, dailies survived (albeit in consolidated, monopolized forms in most cities) as the only place you could get such data. With that advantage gone, what would a paper need? Perhaps a strong aesthetic, a sense of the zeitgeist, a coherent package of articles and pictures that at least pretends to try and make sense of a crazy world.

That's where the P-I, the closest thing the Northwest has to a progressive daily, shines best. Its livelier copywriting and more aggressive feature coverage make it a more intriguing read than the Times has ever been (though both papers were sufficiently compliant suckers for the Bushies' propaganda massages this past year).

I prefer the P-I as a news product, but I want both papers to live. Any industry that can't figure out how to make that happen ain't much of an industry.

posted by clark 5:41 PM

THERE'S NOT MUCH I can say that hasn't already been said and will continue to be said, ad infinitum, about the local mainstream media's current favorite tabloid-sleaze saga, the tragic case of the wife-abusing Tacoma police chief who fatally shot his estranged spouse and then himself.

Except this: Above-the-law misbehavior, control freakishness, and delusions of omnipotence among the law's supposed protectors should come as no surprise.

posted by clark 3:36 PM

THE BUSINESS SELF-HELP BOOKS I've been reading lately talk a lot about the principle of "OPM," or "Other People's Money." Nobody knows this better than Bill Gates, who's been steadily rakin' in the OS/Windows/Office software royalties for years while the PC hardware makers' fortunes ebb-'n'-flow. (Anybody remember Acer, Micron, Packard Bell, or Eagle PCs?) Now his MS minions are promoting a new computer hardware format, code-named "Athens." The Athens machine's chock full of MS Windows-only technologies, making it either useless or cumbersome as a potential Linux box. If adopted by enough manufacturers (and their end users), Athens will send more factory-installed-software monies Bill's way, while leaving the manufacturers themselves to compete on razor-thin profit margins to sell boxes with roughly the same features.

posted by clark 2:58 PM

Monday, May 05, 2003

WILLIAM RASPBERRY decries the Bush no-taxes-for-zillionaires plan as "Blatant Flimflam."

posted by clark 2:41 PM

JILL NELSON writes on MSNBC about the rise of a "mean-spirited America:"

"...Americans go along with the program or remain silent, too afraid of the Muslim bogeymen thousands of miles away to recognize the Christian ones in our midst. Fearful that we will be verbally attacked, or shunned, or lose our livelihoods if we dare question the meanness that characterizes our government and, increasingly, defines our national character.

I do not feel safer now than I did six, or 12, or 24 months ago. In fact, I feel far more vulnerable and frightened than I ever have in my 50 years on the planet. It is the United States government I am afraid of. In less than two years the Bush administration has used the attacks of 9/11 to manipulate our fear of terrorism and desire for revenge into a blank check to blatantly pursue imperialist objectives internationally and to begin the rollback of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and most of the advances of the 20th century...

"Three years ago, before the bloodless coup d’etat that made George W. Bush president, America was a far-from-perfect nation. Yet there was the possibility, almost gone now, that our country might evolve into a place that lived up to its loftiest democratic rhetoric. Today, I live in an America that makes my stomach hurt and fills me with terror. A nation run by greedy, frightened, violent bullies. It is time to take our country back before it is too late."

(Found by Kurt Nimmo's Another Day in the Empire.)

posted by clark 11:19 AM

Sunday, May 04, 2003

AS YOU MIGHT KNOW, we at MISC aren't reallly big poetry fans. But we've just been turned on to a poet we can truly appreciate.

Scottish epic versifier William McGonagall (1825?-1902), whose vast output can be read at the above link, is described on the linked site as "a man without talent who thought he was a great poet and tragedian and only needed an opportunity to prove it."

His stuff isn't all that bad really; well maybe largely bad, but not as completely insuffrable as a lot of present-day poesy. For one thing, his poems had stories and at least one-dimensional characters, rather than being limited in scope to the poet's own viewpoints. A lot of them are about turgid events (shipwrecks, battles, tornadoes, domestic melodramas), instead of the smug flower-gazing of nature poets or the self-aggrandizement of slam poets. His execution of these plots and his verbal stylings might seem less than imaginative by the standards of the classicists, but he remains his own man, with his own inimitable manner.

And his stuff all rhymes too.

posted by clark 3:54 PM

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