Kill Your Television: 'Soft Focus' and VBS.tv

UNLESS YOU'RE A LAZY LOAD — or can't afford to have a speedy Internet connection — the days of sitting in your lounge chair and waiting for a good television show are long over.

While VBS.tv still has a way to go to be a first-class "broadcast" service, the Web-video arm of the Vice magazine trend-setting empire is offering an absorbing variety of programs, from documentaries on "out of the way" vacation spots such as an arms market in the Khyber Pass ("The Official Gun Market of Jihad") to Practice Space, which is exactly what it sounds like: artists interviewed in their rehearsal rooms.

There's also a D.C. link to this New York City trendsetter: Ian Svenonius, vocalist with Weird War, and formerly of The Make-Up and Nation of Ulysses, hosts a talk show called "Soft Focus" that spotlights musicians.

In the first season, Svenonius — decked out in a dark blue yacht-club coat and pressed gray slacks — interviewed Will Oldman (Bonnie "Prince" Billy of Palace Brothers), Henry Rollins, Genesis P. Orridge (Psychic TV, Throbbing Gristle), Chan Marshall (Cat Power), Andrew W.K. and Ian MacKaye (Fugazi, Dischord Records) at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan.

For the second season, which premiered Oct. 31 with a Mark E. Smith (The Fall) interview, Svenonius and his haircut traveled to England and chatted up Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine), Billy Childish, Terry Hall (The Specials), Penny Rimbaud (Crass), Bobby Gillespie (Primal Scream), Shaun Ryder (Happy Mondays) and Graham Coxson (Blur).

Svenonius is a smart and entertaining, if occasionally bumbling, interviewer: When he would hit a lull during the first season, he'd sometimes pull a list of questions out of his pocket, which usually led to funny/awkward queries that included anti-capitalist jibes, a communist-friendly quote or a philosophical quotation — sometimes all at once — that left the interviewee and the audience giggling. But it's a good gimmick, like David Letterman's double-eraser pencils and Jay Leno's chronic unfunniness — though anyone who has spoken with Svenonius in the flesh knows it's not a gimmick: Even without a piece of paper filled with mini manifestos, he really talks like this ... all the time.

Like many VBS.tv shows, the "Soft Focus" programs are episodic — and not just because each edition is cut into four brief four-to-eight-minute parts: Vice's television channel works on the same principal as the ultra-hipster magazine, which is, "If you don't know, you don't know — you asshat."

That is to say, you won't get a lot of background as to who, say, Genesis P. Orridge is — or why he's turning himself into a man-woman. Sure, pandrogyny is addressed, but you're better off doing a Google search to find out about Orridge's evolutionary art project and his important place in the histories of punk rock, industrial music and the rave scene.

But even though the interviews and, in particular, the documentaries on VBS.tv rarely have a good flow or focus — plus, the Web site is organized like a messy bedroom — the unique and compelling subject matter usually overcomes any shortcomings in storytelling or presentation.

After all, how can any proud American resist watching the heart-warming saga of how easily guns exchange hands for mere pennies on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan?

One note: We use Spybot to crush spyware and ads in Internet Explorer, and if you use it too — or, perhaps, any ad or spyware blocker — you'll be inundated with requests to allow Doubleclick ads from VBS.tv, with the video stuttering and stopping throughout. Actually, we normally use Firefox, but apparently you're SOL using that browser to view VBS.tv. While we swear we've watched VBS using Firefox before, we couldn't get it to work at all last night.