…independent artists hawked their wares in Occidental Mall on First Thursday. And once again, the bigshot corporate gallery owners made bluster in the daily papers about wanting the non-represented riffraff out of Pioneer Square for good. One gallery boss was quoted smearing the indies’ works as mere “flea market trinkets” that don’t deserve to exist in the same neighborhood with, say, expensive glass bowls. Thus, defenders of the li’l guyz sported T-shirts scoffing at the scoffers.

FUN WITH ELECTRICITY: When first we heard of the Calif. megastore chain Fry’s Electronics coming to Renton, we scoffed. We’d heard so many times of Northern Calif. institutions whose reputations turned out to have been due to little more than being from Northern Calif., that hubris-capital of North America.

But Fry’s turns out to be worth the hype, I must say.

It’s not just another Circuit City/Best Buy clone grown to Goliath size. It’s been designed from step one as Techno-Geek Heaven. Acres of hardware, software, parts and pieces (yep, even that Torx-6 screwdriver I’ve been looking for). Prices aren’t all that great, except for a few loss leader specials. It’s the selection that makes it different, that and the whole vastness of the joint, and the staff that speaks Geekspeak like natives.

While it’s not in an established strip-mall zone, it’s easy to get to by public transport because it’s reasonably close to the main Boeing Renton bus stop. (Not that Fry’s is all that keen on non-drivers shopping there; its delivery fees are tremendous, and staffers write down the serial numbers of anything customers bring in in backpacks that’s even close to merchandise Fry’s sells.)

Between Boeing and the also-nearby Kenworth truck plant, it’s right in the heart of our industrial heritage. But the fourth big institution in the neighborhood, the giant Cirque du Soleil tent complex, heralds a postmodern, postindustrial, upscaled culture built from the forms of populist working-class entertainments of olden days.

Fry’s is intended for “knowledge workers,” for engineers and designers and coders, not for assembly-line grunts. You can find U.S.-built products in the store, but they’re more readily found in cheaper categories (DVD discs) than in expensive ones (DVD players). No, Fry’s is a store for an America that, to quote an old Doonesbury line, “doesn’t have to make anything anymore—except SUCCESS.”