…to Raymond “Ras Bongo” Lindsay, the Lake City music-store owner and longtime staple of the local roots-music circuit, who was slain in an apparent domestic dispute. I’d only met Bongo offstage once, at his store (see above), but instantly sensed him as a gentle man of a centered sensibility.

TO AVE AND AVE NOT DEPT.: Last weekend’s University District Street Fair was supposed to have been the coming-out party for the completely rebuilt University Way. But, in traditional best-laid-plans fashion, the Ave’s northernmost big block (47th to 50th) remained closed and unpaved.

Ergo, the fair was shrunk to about 70 percent of its normal size. The audience’s size, and energy level, seemed even further reduced, despite decent weather. This may have befitted a neighborhood that was already stuck in the retail doldrums even before the totally traffic-closing construction scheme made it worse.

Some UW design students had a big display in the former Tower Records storefront, full of schemes to redo the Ave’s storefronts so they’d look all fresh and Euro-modern, not the funky/rundown amalgamation of low-rise architectures we all know and love.

Still, there’s something to be said for a reinvent-the-Ave campaign that comes out of a sense of creativity, that asks young adults (rather than corporate consulting firms) what a young-adult shopping street should look like, and that imagines plenty of spaces for independent businesses instead of the same ol’ dorky chains.