• At Grist.org, Claire Thompson looks wistfully at south Seattle’s prized yet delicate ethnic/religious/class diversity, and wonders how it can survive.
• There was a big political science convention in town this past week. (An odd phrase, considering the number of politicians these days who officially hate regular ol’ science.) Anyhoo, Peter Steinbrueck spoke to the gathering about how this country needs more regional decision-making bodies to plan metro-wide futures.
• The head of Belltown’s Matt Talbot Center, a Christian alcohol/drug recovery center, was arrested and is on suicide watch, for “investigation of attempted rape” of a 10 year old boy. Let’s spare the snark and focus on the tragedy for now.
• The head of the Seattle police union apparently believes diversity, tolerance, and common human decency are somehow anti-American. This is not going to turn out well. In fact, it already hasn’t.
• Don’t look for a lot more living wage jobs any time soon. At least not from corporate America.
• Eric L. Wattree believes the nation’s #1 problem isn’t the economy (as putrid as it is), but “the Republican sabotage of America.”
• Finally, here’s a brief peek at Nicholson Baker’s novel House of Holes; specifically at the orgasm sound-effect words and phrases therein.

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

My book Walking Seattle, which I told you about here some months back, is finally out.

The big coming out party is Sunday, Sept. 24, 5 p.m., at the Elliott Bay Book Co. This event will include a 30-minute mini walk around the Pike-Pike neighborhood.

When I came up with the idea of a mini-walk, the store’s staff initially asked what the theme of my mini walk would be. Would it be about the gay scene, or the hipster bar scene, or the music scene, or classic apartment buildings, or houses of worship, or old buildings put to new uses?

The answer: Yes. It will be about all of the above. And more.

The reason: Part of what makes Capitol Hill so special (and such a great place to take a walk) is all the different subcultures that coexist here.

A tourist from the Northeast this summer told me he was initially confused to find so many different groups (racial, religious, and otherwise self-identified) in just about every neighborhood in this town.

Back where he came from, people who grew up in one district of a city (or even on one street) stayed there, out of loyalty and identity. But in Seattle you’ve got gays and artists and African immigrant families and Catholics and professors and cops and working stiffs and doctors all living all over the place. People and families go wherever they get the best real-estate deal at the time, no matter where it is.

On the Hill, this juxtaposition is only more magnified.

In terms of religion alone, Pike/Pine and its immediate surroundings feature Seattle’s premier Jewish congregation, its oldest traditionally African American congregation, the region’s top Catholic university, a “welcoming” (that means they like gays) Baptist church, Greek and Russian Orthodox churches, and a new age spiritual center. Former classic Methodist and Christian Science buildings are now repurposed to offices and condos respectively. And yet, in the eyes of many, the Hill is today better known for what happens on Saturday night than on Sunday morning.

A lot of Igor Keller’s Greater Seattle CD is a quaint look back at when this city’s neighborhoods could be easily typed, as they famously were on KING-TV’s old Almost Live!

Perhaps you might find a few more franchised vitamin sellers in Fremont, or a few more halal butchers near MLK and Othello.

But for the sheer variety of different groups and subgroups and sub-subgroups, there’s no place like this place anywhere near this place.

•

Though a lot of the time, these different “tribes” don’t live in harmony as much as in they silently tolerate one another’s presence.

To explain this, let’s look at another book.

British novelist China Mieville’s book The City and the City is a tale of two fictional eastern European city-states, “Bezsel” and “Ul Qoma.” These cities don’t merely border one another; they exist on the same real estate. The residents of each legally separate “city” are taught from birth to only interact with, or even recognize the existence of, the fellow citizens of their own “city.” If they, or ignorant tourists, try to cross over (even if it just means crossing a street), an efficient secret police force shows up and carts them away.

It’s easy to see that scenario as a metaphor for modern urban life in a lot of places, including the Hill. It’s not the oft talked about (and exaggerated) “Seattle freeze.” It’s people who consider themselves part of a “community” of shared interests more than a community of actual physical location.

The young immigrant learning a trade at Seattle Central Community College may feel little or no rapport with the aging rocker hanging out at a Pike/Pine bar. The high-tech commuter having a late dinner at a fashionable bistro may never talk to the single mom trying to hold on to her unit in an old apartment building.

Heck, even the gay men and the lesbians often live worlds apart.

It’s great to have all these different communities within the geographical community of the Hill.

But it would be greater to bring more of them together once in a while, to help form a tighter sense of us all belonging and working toward common goals.

• Seattle still doesn’t have its fully deserved NBA team back, or any fully formed plan to bring it back. But the promoters of a new LA pseudo-sport, “lingerie basketball,” say this will be one of the first places they hope to expand to. From first glance at this operation, the Storm has nothing to worry about.
• Seattle was named America’s #1 tech city, by a highly unscientific (hence less than geek-trusted) survey.
• Who loves (with their bucks) this year’s state liquor privatization measure? Costco (who started it) and Trader Joe’s. Who’s against it? Beer and wine distributors, who’d rather not see Costco gain the power edge them out of wholesaling. On the sidelines so far: Safeway, Kroger (owner of QFC and Fred Meyer), Supervalu (Albertsons).
• It’s smaller than the Gorge but at least as spectacular. It’s the new ampitheater at Mt. St. Helens.
• Intiman Theatre might come back from the grave. Just might, mind you.
• The US Dept. of Transportation has formally approved the deeply boring tunnel to replace the lovely, doomed Viaduct.
• Could JPMorgan Chase engulf and devour Bank of America like it did Washington Mutual?
• Network TV has fewer women in it this year, on either side of the camera.
• A Tea Party regional boss in South Carolina put up a “joke” on her Facebook page, about how cool it would be if Obama were assassinated. She’s now made her Facebook page private.
• Today’s “Google doodle” logo illustration is all about Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian author born 112 years ago today. Yeah, that’s a strange un-round number of an anniversary. But then, oddities, conundrums, things that didn’t seem to make nice round sense were found all over Borges’ stories. (He didn’t write novels, though some of his short stories were about novels in a meta, recursive way.)
• Author Simon Reynolds says enough-already to the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Grunge nostalgia, he feels, is worse than pop eating itself:

…The more that the present is taken up with reunion tours, re-enactments, and contemporary revivalist groups umbilically bound by ties of reference and deference to rock’s glory days, the smaller the chances are that history will be made today.

• Juan Cole does something that a lot of pundits do, to my dismay. He posts a list of the “Top Ten Myths About the Libya War.” But he never quotes or cites these memes he’s denouncing. Who actually claimed Gaddafi was a “progressive,” or that he would not have massacred more of his own people given the chance? Cole only sources one of the assertions he puts down, quoting Alexander Cockburn as saying the war would end badly and Libya could get broken up at its end.
• Here’s the full text of Dennis Kucinich’s Hempfest speech calling for “a new activism in the United States.”
• Is it culturally insensitive to call a young boys’ sports league “midget football?”
• Much of Capitol Hill, including big swaths of Broadway and Pike/Pine, were rendered powerless by an electrical blackout Monday afternoon/evening. It lasted just long enough to mess up the commute home and close bars during happy hour.
• A Seattle U. report claims the South Lake Union developments have generated all the jobs they were predicted to generate back in the early 2000s, and a little more.
• The state’s now making the sellers of toys, cosmetics, and baby products reveal when their products contain any harmful chemicals.
• Mercer Island (sort of) street theater, part 2: Lefties put up a huge bare-butt balloon near Seward Park, with the caption SHARED SACRIFICE MY ASS. It was hoisted within view of Paul Allen’s M.I. compound.
• In case you wondered, the Elwha Dam will be dismantled, not imploded.
• Is this what we’ve descended to, a guy (author-essayist Sam Harris) pleading with America’s rich to put their money behind something, anything, more noble than their own selves?
• Hollywood scholar Matthias Stork has a name for loud, frenetic, disjointed action movies. He calls them “chaos cinema.” And he doesn’t like it:

It’s a shotgun aesthetic, firing a wide swath of sensationalistic technique that tears the old classical filmmaking style to bits.… It doesn’t matter where you are, and it barely matters if you know what’s happening onscreen. The new action films are fast, florid, volatile audiovisual war zones.

• R.I.P. Jack Layton, leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, who’d led his left-of-center bloc’s recent push to become that country’s Official Opposition (i.e., #2 in number of Parliament seats). That was in May. In July he stepped down from the NDP, announcing he had cancer. Layton was a fighter for workers, for the homeless, for the environment, and for preserving Canada’s superior health care system.

• Ex-Seattleite Tom Spurgeon wrote for The Comics Journal after I left there, then wrote for the Stranger after I left there. More recently, he’s had a debilitating medical condition, which he doesn’t fully explain in his hereby-linked essay. What he does discuss are his thoughts during his enforced bedrest, about comics, film, and being human.
• At least five enlisted personnel at Joint Base Lewis-McChord have committed suicide in less than two months. More needless casualties of the two needless wars.
• State officials found what they apparently thought was a simple “tax loophole” whose “closing” would generate much-needed revenue. It involves imposing “dance taxes” on bars and nightclubs—retroactively—based on a decades-old ordinance intended to regulate exercise studios. Some clubs say it could put them out of business.
• Unemployment in our state is still icky big.
• Amazon boss Jeff Bezos just gave $10 million to the Museum of History and Industry’s new complex at Lake Union Park, set to open late next year.
• If you don’t have enough to be scared of, just think about the “brain-eating amoeba.”
• Headline of the day: “Social Security Declares 14,000 Living People Dead Every Year.”
• The amorphous tangle of billionaire-funded “populist uprisings” collectively known as the “tea party” is massively unpopular. I mean massively.
• PBS’s Judy Woodruff tries to explain the consequences of extreme wealth inequality on a show underwritten by corporate funders out for a nearly-exclusively upscale audience…
• …while Amanda Marcotte (no, I don’t expect you to know all these web-pundit names) looks at right-wingers’ replies to the Verizon strike and declares we’re living in a new feudalism. So where are all the Renaissance Faire costumes?
• Among the top-grossing movies so far this year, you have to go down to position #8 to find a live-action, non-sequel, non-superhero film (Bridesmaids).

• The rules of cricket.
• The real names of the Residents.
• Who the characters “really were” in any ’50s-’60s novel set in New York City.
• What’s under a kilt.
• What’s under a Utilikilt.
• What heroin use feels like.
• What (insert name of debilitating disease here) feels like.

original mac screen fonts, from folklore.org

There’s a battle going on in the e-book field, one of the few media businesses that’s truly booming these days.

At stake: what these non-thing purchases will cost you.

In one corner: Amazon. The Seattle e-commerce king and Kindle e-book machine seller wants to set its own e-book prices (with most mass-market titles at $9.99), no matter what publishers want.

(Amazon also wants to eliminate the “hardcover window,” the early months of publication in which only the high-priced deluxe version of a book can be bought. Specifically, Amazon wants to sell e-books of a title the same week as that title’s dead-tree version first comes out.)

In the other corner: Five of America’s six biggest publishers (HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, Simon & Schuster), plus Apple (in a third corner?). The publishers have publicly proposed a different pricing structure, which they call “the agency model.” Under this scheme, publishers would set e-book retail prices. The e-book selling sites (Apple, Amazon, B&N, Kobo, etc.) would keep a 30 percent margin from this price.

Early last year, Macmillan threatened to withhold its titles from Amazon’s Kindle e-book platform until Amazon capitulated to the “agency model,” which it did; but only after Amazon threatened to withhold selling Macmillan’s physical books from the main Amazon site.

Now, a Seattle law firm has filed a class action suit in a California U.S. District Court. The suit alleges the five publishing giants and Apple have conspired to drive up e-book prices. The law firm names two individual consumers, in California and Mississippi, as the case’s official plaintiffs.

•

With all this going on, William Skidelsky at the Guardian asks what’s the “true price” of a book as a written and edited document, rather than as a physical object.

Skidelsky quotes ex-Billboard editor Robert Levine, who’s written a forthcoming tract entitled Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back. Levine, as you’d guess, takes the side of the intellectual-property industry, including the book publishers.

Levine (as quoted by Skidelsky) states that it only costs $3.50 to “print and distribute” a hardcover book.

Thus, the argument goes, e-books should be just that much cheaper than physical books, no more.

However, it’s not that simple.

First of all, the whole pricing structure of physical books is about the design, manufacture, shipping, warehousing, and retailing of the object; including big margins to the retailers and wholesalers (who still sometimes have trouble keeping afloat). When all that’s reduced to the storage of some megabytes on a server, that whole pricing model goes away.

And much of the publisher’s share of a book’s price includes an allowance for the industry’s tremendous physical waste. If a copy shipped to a bookstore doesn’t sell, it gets sent back. All those copies are either re-shipped at clearance prices (more likely for coffee-table picture books) or destroyed. With e-books, none of that happens.

•

You will note that, aside from Levine, we haven’t mentioned authors.

What would an e-book pricing structure look like if it were based on the people who actually make what’s being bought?

Take the current royalties for a book’s authors and illustrators.

Then at least double them.

Not only do the creators deserve it, but such a step would acknowledge that, since e-books are cheaper to get out, there will be more titles out there scrambling for readers’ bucks, and hence each individual title might not sell as much.

Then add in a budget item for the work-for-hire participants in a book’s making—the editors and designers and cover artists and licensors of agency photographs. Again, they’d be higher than for traditional paper books, to make up for lower expected total sales.

There’s still a role in the e-book realm for what we call “publishers.” They put up the money. They arrange promotion and advertising. They put authors, artists, and editors together. In many cases, they organize the transmutation of a vague idea into a saleable product.

Once these parties all have their pieces of the pie set into a fixed wholesale price, e-book sellers could charge as much or as little as they think they can get away with.

•

That’s one potential e-book pricing model. There are others.

One is that of Take Control Books, for which I’ve worked in the past. They sell their e-books directly on their own site. Half the retail take, minus a cut for the company’s e-commerce provider, goes directly to the authors. (Take Control sells its e-books as .pdf files, which can be transferred with greater or lesser ease to all e-book reading devices.)

Another is self publishing, that past and present refuge of the artiste with no perceived commercial potential. Only in the e-book age, some authors are actually succeeding this way.

Earlier this year, bestselling thriller writer Barry Eisler said he was walking out of his “handshake deal” with St. Martin’s Press. For the time being, all books written by Eisler will be published by Eisler.

Of course, Eisler has an established “brand” for his works; much like Radiohead had when they released a download-only album. And Eisler has experience in the Silicon Valley startup world.

A more realistic role model would be that of Amanda Hocking. She’s young. She’s photogenic. She writes in a popular commercial-fiction genre. She’s sold a million e-books without a corporate backer (she’s got one now, though).

•

The business side of book publishing, as I’ve carped here for years, has been a moribund, tradition-obsessed infrastructure of waste and lost opportunity.

E-books represent the biggest chance in decades (since the rise of the big-book bookstore chains) to fix this.

Let’s not blow it.

(Thanx and a hat tip to Michael Jacobs for suggesting added angles to this story.)

2005 fremont solstice parade goers at the lenin statue

• The Lenin statue in Fremont is privately owned, and is for sale. But nobody apparently wants to buy it.
• Minorities: Bellevue’s got a lot more of ’em these days, sez the Census. Seattle’s got a lot fewer.
• Art Thiel wants you to know the big Husky Stadium rebuild, to begin this winter, involves no taxpayer funds. Just private donations and bond issues to be repaid out of UW Athletics income.
• Ex-State Rep Brendan Williams wants Washington state’s progressives to “get some backbone” about preserving vital services in the state budget.
• Starbucks boss and Sonics seller Howard Schultz’s latest big idea: Big election-campaign donors like him should vow to boycott funding election campaigns. Of course, if Democratic donors like Schultz are the only ones doing the boycotting….
• There’s a plan to create a “Jimi Hendrix Park,” next to the African American Museum at the old Coleman School. It would be the fifth Hendrix memorial of one type or another (not counting the Experience Music Project, which parted ways with the Hendrix heirs during its development). Cobain still has just that one unofficial park bench in Viretta Park and a city-limits sign in Aberdeen.
• Rolling Stone put out a reader poll declaring the top punk acts of all time. The list put Green Day on top and included not a single female. FlavorWire has come to the side of justice with its own in-house listing of “15 Essential Women Punk Icons.” The NW’s own Kathleen Hanna, Beth Ditto, and Sleater-Kinney are on it, as is onetime Seattleite Courtney Love.
• Many, many indie-label CDs were in a warehouse that burned during the London lootings. Some labels might not survive the blow.
• Mike Elgan at Cult of Mac sez Apple’s invented all the big things it’s going to invent for a while. We’ve heard this one before.
• And for those of you heading back into the working life (you lucky stiffs, you), take heed Peter Toohey’s thoughts (partly inspired by the late David Foster Wallace) on “the thrill of boredom:”

Boredom should not be abused, exploited, ignored, sneered at, rejected or talked down to as a product of laziness or of an idle, uninventive and boring mind. It’s there to help, and its advice should be welcomed and acted upon.

from thelmagazine.com

There’s bad news today for the book snobs out there.

(You know, the droning turned-up-nose guys who love to whine that Nobody Reads Anymore, except of course for themselves and their own pure little subculture.)

Turns out, according to a study co-sponsored by two industry groups, book sales are actually up over the past three years!

Yes, even during this current economic blah-blah-blah!

Ebook sales have particularly exploded.

But regular dead-tree volumes are also up; except for mass market paperbacks (perhaps the most vulnerable category to the ebook revolution).

Adult fiction sales rose 8.8 percent from early ’08 to late ’10. Also doing well, according to the NYT story about the study: “Juvenile books, which include the current young-adult craze for paranormal and dystopian fiction….” (Good news for people who love bad news, to quote a Modest Mouse CD.)

Oh, as for that other commercial communications medium? You know, the medium that the book snobs call their sworn enemy?

The AP headline says it all: “Pay TV industry loses record number of subscribers.”

•

Has the above inspired you to get with the program, hop on the bandwagon, follow the fad, and start buying some more books for your very own?

I have a great little starter number, just for you.

• Some guy who’s writing his own Seattle music-scene book has just listed me among the most “underrated Seattle music people.” Considering that the only public musical performing I’ve done is karaoke, I guess that’s an accomplishment.
• Today’s sermon against the deep bore tunnel comes from the Tacoma News Tribune, which chides the state Dept. of Transportation for refusing to make its tunnel-related records public.
• What they didn’t want to release, an internal memo about the tunnel project’s financial prospects, has been leaked online by tunnel opponents.
• R.I.P. Mark Hatfield, an actual sane Republican (back when there was such a thing) and one of the first national lawmakers to public acknowledge the Vietnam war was a huge mistake. The hereby-linked Oregonian obit claims Hatfield had been on the short list for the GOP VP nomination in ’68; but Richard Nixon chose the more “southern strategy” friendly (i.e., demagogue-like) Spiro Agnew.
• Obama insists that the Standard & Poor’s nonsense notwithstanding, America is still “a triple-A country.” So why don’t we try harder to break into the majors? (At least it’s better than the bush leagues, where we were when the seeds of this mess were planted.)
• Virginia Heffernan asks, and believes she has an answer, why grade-school students can write very lucid blog posts and lousy class papers. She calls for a move away from industrial-age rote learning and a return to “socratic learning.”
• Michael Wolff says he knows how to get the Rupert Murdoch empire out of the U.S.—sic ’em with the RICO Act.
• There’s panic on the streets of London, and spreading to other U.K. cities. It was originally inspired by protests against police brutality. Guardian commentator Nina Power offers another reason—increasing inequality in that land (still not as bad as it is here). The same paper also quotes academicians who see large parts of a whole young generation who believe they have no future. Is this the story of Johnny Rotten?

from boobsdontworkthatway.tumblr.com

• Comic and fantasy artists, and their fans, have long been stereotyped as guys who don’t know anything about women. Here’s visual evidence supporting the allegation, in a blog entitled “Boobs Don’t Work That Way.” (And here’s some advice from artist Max Riffner on how to draw women as if you paid attention to them.)
• Wu’s boo-boo puts Wu in deep doo-doo.
• If all-electric cars take off, how will we make and distribute the electricity needed to run them?
• Author Robert S. Becker is one of the commentators who sees the ideological roots of American conservatism in the heritage of the Deep South, in its economy of big corporate farms led by self-styled “rebels” and operated by cheap and/or enslaved labor.…
• …while Paul Krugman has had it up to here with the myth that there’s a “centrist” silent majority, made up of “swing voters” who somehow happen to completely agree with the D.C. pundit caste.
• Phony debt “crisis” conspiracy theory of the day: Are Republicans luring Obama into unilaterally raising the debt ceiling, as an excuse to impeach him?
• The post-lockout Seahawks will do without the star quarterback who stayed a little too long.
• Councilmember Nick Licata would like a city park dedicated to Seattle writers. I might have a snark about this a little later on.
• This year’s Burning Man festival in Nevada will be the last. Now, all the Seattle artists who only show their work at Burning Man might have to actually exhibit it to (gasp!) locals.

• Seattle artist Ginny Ruffner’s giant plastic robotic flower pot is now fully operational at Seventh Avenue and Union Street, across from ACT Theatre and in front of the back end of the Sheraton Hotel. Any resemblance to “Wilting Willie,” the puppet flower pot from the old local kids’ TV show Wunda Wunda, is purely coincidental.
• Update #1: Upon the request of the Tulalip Tribes, Microsoft has removed the internal code name “Tulalip” from its otherwise not officially announced social networking project.
• Update #2: There will indeed be one last art party at the 619 Western studios, before all 100-or-so artists in the 101-year-old building get evicted. The hastily arranged event is “Last Thursday,” to be held, yes, on July 28.
• The state Liquor Board’s response to Seattle’s request to let bars stay open after 2 a.m.? They’ll “consider it.”
• War on Working Americans Dept.: Someone allegedly turned on heat lamps beamed at a picket line outside an on-strike Hyatt hotel in Chicago, in the middle of the worst heat wave America (except the Pac NW) has seen in years.
• There’s now a foosball table with female players! And they’re not Barbies!
• Today, we are all Sons and Daughters of Norway.

first 'weekly' cover, 1976, from historylink.org

The late investor and arts patron Bagley Wright lived just long enough to see one of the local institutions he jump-started, Seattle Weekly, descend from troubled to pathetic.

First, the paper got caught up, through no fault of its own, in the PR campaign against its parent company Village Voice Media and VVM’s online escort-ad site Backpage.com. Mayor McGinn has ordered the city to not advertise in the Weekly until VVM closes Backpage.

Second, and this is something local management’s responsible for, was a cover story about an S&M practitioner accused of turning a consensual encounter with a streetwalker into a non-consensual violent assault. Feminist blogger Cara Kulwicki has called the story’s writer and SW’s editors “rape apologists,” citing the author’s speculating that the event might have simply been “a bondage session gone haywire.”

Now, they’ve put out a cover piece about local true-crime author Ann Rule. The article’s writer (who’d never written for the Weekly before) claimed Rule had written lies and/or conducted sloppy research about an Oregon woman convicted of murder, in Rule’s 2003 book Heart Full of Lies. The issue was published before SW editors figured out the article had been written by the convicted woman’s boyfriend.

Setting aside the matter of Backpage, over which the SW staff has no power, the once solidly establishment Weekly is drowning in sensationalism. Maybe it should swim back toward safer areas like politics (oops, VVM cut way back on the Weekly’s formerly formidable news staff) or arts coverage (oops, ditto).

pittsburgh post-gazette illo by anita dufalla, 2009

• Census data says even more of Seattle’s low-income population (some 68 percent) now resides in the suburbs. However, I’m not ready (as this linked article is) to declare the likes of Tukwila and Skyway to be “suburban slums.”
• New fun word of the day: “blagging” (defined by the BBC as “obtaining personal details by deception,” as in the Murdoch UK tabloids’ nefarious gossip trawling).
• R.I.P. Theodore Roszak, who was 35 in 1969 when his book The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society professed to know just what Those Krazy Kids were up to.
• Pyramid Hefeweisen is now called Pyramid Hefeweisen again, following a three-year failure to rebrand the wheat ale as “Haywire.” I could repeat my hefeweisen riddle here, but I won’t.
• There is such a thing as wearing too many clothes. If you’re in a mall. And you didn’t pay for some of those clothes.
• Amazon’s own tablet computer—look for it this autumn.
• The local ski season is finally over.
• Oh, all right: What do you call the last hefeweisen that causes a yuppie to total her new car? (Answer tomorrow.)

It’s a shame so many modern-day folk only know Roald Dahl as a “children’s writer.” He was more of a gruesome fabulist, some of whose stories were marketed as children’s fare.

Even the most famous screen version of his darker side, the once ubiquitously-rerun UK TV series Tales of the Unexpected, isn’t widely associated with Dahl. He hosted the show’s first two seasons, which mostly were adapted from his prose. After he quit the show, it continued another seven seasons without him. The show became noticeably lighter in tone as it evolved further away from Dahl’s conceptions.

But for straight-no-chaser Dahl misanthropy, though, there’s no better visual source than ‘Way Out. (Yes, it was spelled that way.)

It was one of the last prime time anthology shows made in New York. It was produced by David Susskind. Dahl introduced the episodes and wrote only the first, an adaptation of his own story William and Mary. But they all display a devilish cruelty.

Of the 14 episodes produced in 1961, five have made it onto the collectors’ circuit, and from there to YouTube. Those can all be found at this link.

Most of them have no sympathetic or even likable characters. There are no Rod Serling moral lessons, and no Alfred Hitchcock ironic twists. It’s all morbid and deadly.

Which, of course, made it a commercial flop.

And so much fun.

You can tell you’re not in Serling-land right at the opening logo sequence. It’s a series of human hands, reaching up in futility from the ground (buried alive?).