…the eternally youthful ex-Fastbacks guitarist Lulu Gargiulo, who got a big spread in the Seattle Times Sunday mag section concerning her and her hubby’s retro-futurist home.

…(actually a rather anticlimactic tale) will be online as soon as I’m regulalry online again.

For now, suffice it to say I’m in beautiful Belltown again, in a big airy space. I still need four things to make it my true home:

• To get most of my stuff, including my collections of books, zines, and vinyl records, back from the rental storage locker (anybody gotta truck?);
• A few key furniture pieces, including a bed, a dresser, a new computer desk, and some bar stools;
• A working broadband connection (supposedly coming sometime within the week); and
• the usual little “home making” touches (curtains, hangings, tchotchkes, etc.).

In the meantime, here’s a link to the Listening to Prozac author talking about creativity and depression, those two great tastes that taste rancid together.

…and signage, so you know I’m gonna love a site entirely devoted to Pittsburgh signs. Look for the old Clark Bar sign toward the end of the tour.

IT’S THE LAST CHAPTER of our recent jaunt to Tacoma. Today: Just a few of the magnificently restored stoic downtown buildings.

Tacoma, as you who’ve read regional history might recall, was originally developed as a Northern Pacific Railway company town. Like all the western land-grant railroads, the NP tried to control all commerce in the territories it settled. By siting its western terminus at its own town, the NP hoped for a stranglehold on the Northwest economy and on north-Pacific ocean shipping as well.

But Seattle offered a more wide-open, less regulated form of capitalism. This, along with the help of the rival Great Northern Railway (now merged, with the NP, into the BNSF), the siting of the University of Washington, and the success of a former furniture maker named Bill Boeing, secured Seattle’s dominance. Seattle became the region’s financial and cultural capital; Tacoma became an industrial and military city.

When I-5 came through town in 1965, coinciding with the opening of Tacoma Mall, downtown Tacoma was left to rot.

It took more than three decades and a series of public projects (including museums, live theaters, and a UW branch campus) to bring downtown Tacoma back.

It still doesn’t have a mainstream movie theater, or any retailer bigger than the University Book Store. But it’s got galleries, funky boutiques, antique shops, restaurants, bars, cafes, high-offices, and (most importantly) a spirit of possibility.

I’ll forever remember this Tully’s as Tracey Ullman’s pizza place in the film classic I Love You to Death.

At this “graffiti garage,” young spray-paint artists are permitted to create, then cover-up and replace, their expressions of urban individuality.

Our thanks to John Poetzel and “T.Y.D.” for recommending, and escorting me to, some of the sites shown in this series.

WE’LL HAVE ONE MORE set of Tacoma pix following today’s installment, which focuses on quaint signs and on the city’s seaport.

As far as I know, no late-night Showtime comedy series have ever been filmed on this street.

Unlike the unified port districts of New York/New Jersey and Los Angeles/Long Beach, Puget Sound’s seaports operate separately and competitively. This cuts costs for shippers, but raises costs for taxpayers. The Port of Tacoma’s public history kiosk, at the base of the viewing platform where the above shot was made, still boasts of having snagged Totem Ocean Trailer Express (an Alaska container-cargo operation) away from the Port of Seattle back in the mid-’80s.

(via Kerrick Mainrender):

“Thanks for pix of the 11th St. Bridge, which I think was named after Murray Morgan [not sure]; it is the waterway that’s named after Foss.  It is a neat bridge, whose fate has been in question for some time, and so now I have one more thing to worry about.

Do you have any links to the people who want to save it? [I know, I’ll search on my own, too.]  Not that there’s much I could do, my own condition being about the same as its.  [No, no birds, or I’d eat them–maybe just call it a falcon sanctuary?]  Way back when, the paper asked people for names for it, and my own favorite is ‘Great 11th.’

Not really any of my business since I don’t live in Tacoma, but still.

You have a neat site, BTW.”

The once-forlorn downtown of T-Town’s undergone some magnificent renewal in recent years. Still down-n’-out, though, is the once-stoic 1906 Elks club building.

The Elks themselves want nothing to do with their former palace. The landlord wants to raze it for condos. The civic-preservation clique wants it restored. Rebellious kids climb into it through broken windows for squat parties.

And a local guerilla-art group, Beautiful Angle, posts flyers on its boarded-up doors. This flyer depicts the nearby Thea Foss Bridge, also threatened with razing.

The fine print reads: “I am the fishbone stuck in the craw of a great jazz singer, who wishes it were gone and then wonders afterwards why the songs don’t sound as sweet.”

The couple who escorted me down the bridge called it “the Bridge of Death.” A large bird apparently lives in the upper rafters and attacks smaller birds, whose carcasses litter the roadway beneath.

At least one more batch of T-Town pix is still to come.

IT’S DAY TWO of our photo-jaunt up and down the length of that famed street of independent retail, South Tacoma Way.

Oldsmobile may be gone, but an Olds used-car sign remains at Russ Dunmire. One of the last 100 or so Olds-only dealers that remained, it now sells Mazdas.

Incidentally, the great rock combo Ruston Mire is partly named for this dealership, and for the dealership’s once-ubiquitous TV jingle. The band name’s other, more direct source: The Superfund cleanup site at the Tacoma suburb of Ruston, where an ASARCO copper smelter once manufactured arsenic.

Jack Roberts may be dead, but he’ll still take a pie in the face to give you a deal on a new fridge. And he’s given up a big white wall for one of those murals by at-risk youth.

Ponder the potential meanings of a used-car lot called “Bag Lady:”

1. She sells cars so cheaply, she can’t afford one herself. Let alone a domicile.2. At a bank Dumpster somewhere, there’s a pile of loan contracts she can collect into a grocery cart, which are still legally valid.

3. From her appearance, she’s potentially willing to do more to make a deal than Jack Roberts ever would.

This no-name restaurant sign now points down to a Subway franchise.

This neon, I’m told, still works at night, sort of.

After a long afternoon of exploring, there’s only one place to go—the taco wagon!

Over the next several days, I’ll show off some pix I took on a recent jaunt to our neighbors to the south.

First off, the signs and other sights of that great street immortalized by Neko Case, South Tacoma Way.

The Starlite Drive-In is, like most un-razed drive-ins, now an all-week swap meet.

Come in to the PI Bank for today’s special interest rate, 3.14159 percent.

The magnificent Java Jive survives, while many other nightspots and merchants have not.

Also surviving, sort of: The B&I Shopping Center. Once a thriving indie discount store, amusement arcade, and private zoo, it’s now a mini-mall at which various scrappy mom-n’-pop merchants hawk telephone cards, T-shirts, religious trinkets, Yu-Gi-Oh cards, and Mexican soda pop. Ivan the gorilla, who lived at the store for years until economics and politics sent him off to a regular zoo, still oversees the place in caricature form.

In the ’70s and ’80s the Tacoma Mall, and its adjacent strip-mall spaces, absorbed most of the City of Destiny’s retail trade. City-planner types moped about the decimation of Tacoma’s downtown, which has only recently begun to rebound. Few such official concerns were raised over the fate of South Tacoma Way (the in-city stretch of U.S. 99).

America’s great retail chains either moved out of South Tacoma Way or never moved in. Today, the only corporate names you’ll see on that street are those on franchised car dealers and gas stations. South Tacoma Way is a haven for independent retailers of all types—at least for those who can stay in business in today’s Bush-decimated economy.

More of these to come.

IT’S BEEN AWHILE since we ran a Random Photo Phriday. We’ve some nice shots saved up; here are a few.

…has nice things to say about palatial PoMo architecture.

A random survey finds our own Safeco Field the second-most popular ballpark among baseball players. For opposing teams this year, it’s been real popular, alas….

Unsorted shots for your pondering pleasure.

The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, Paul Allen’s latest vanity monument, opened Friday morning with a simple ceremony. Instead of the all-star weekend of free rock concerts that marked the opening of SFM’s parent organization, the Experience Music Project, SFM merely had some short speeches by the usual suspects (Allen, Mayor Nickels, author Neal Stephenson, etc.).

Nickels, bless him, turned out to be a geek at heart. He thanked the costumed “extraterrestrials” in the audience, and closed his remarks with “Live long and prosper.”

Several of the suspects then jointly pressed a button which set off metallic confetti showers, some steam spurting out of the robo-bug gizmo on the building, and “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (a.k.a. the 2001 theme) blared forth.

Among the costumed fans in attendance was our ol’ pal and Punk Lust zine editor Willum Pugmyr (above).

Management didn’t let me take pictures inside the museum. But I can tell you it’s a fanboy’s dream. For the (relatively costly) price of admission, you get to see dozens of real movie props (Captain Kirk’s chair, the Lost in Space robot), costumes, illustration-art pieces, fanzine pages, book covers, toys, and more. There are also many clever computer-based displays, including the “Hall of Fame” section (honoring some three dozen influential authors), and two impressive globular video-projection units.

And as a writer, I was pleased to see all the attention given to the written origins of sci-fi.

The space is smallish. But since the EMP’s vast Sky Church auditorium’s adjacent, it can be used for any SFM special events, which I hope will include author panels, film festivals, and other fan-convention favorites.

The place is fun, and the strolling experience through the small space is appropriately akin to traversing a cramped spaceship. I’m just disappointed at the $10 admission fee. Perhaps Mr. Allen needs to be reminded that some of us have less spending money than he does.

Conflicting news reports hint at what might happen to the Broadway Market minimall, which has suffered during the recent retail slump like many other merchant sites. A P-I story claims Kroger, which owns both the relatively-small Fred Meyer drug/variety store anchoring Broadway Market and the QFC grocery across the street, may stick a Fred Meyer food department into the Broadway Market building. A Stranger news brief last week suggested Kroger would pull its existing QFC operation into the building.

Either way, some of the current mall spaces would be shuffled around or displaced altogether. I happen to think that’s not necessarily catastrophic for small business on Capitol Hill. There are other vacant Broadway storefronts (including the former Orpheus Records, Godfather’s Pizza, and Chang’s Mongolian Grill sites) available for subdividing on behalf of indie merchants. There’d be even more such space if the Broadway/Republican QFC (one of the last former A&P buildings in Seattle still used for grocery selling) is vacated. Some smart developer could fashion one or more of those lots into a funky mercantile destination that’d be perfect for some of the smaller current Broadway Market retailers. Let’s just hope such future developers do a better job of landing and nurturing tenants than was done at Pike Street’s short-lived Capitol Hill Independent Mall.