…to purchase a freshly autographed copy of Seattle’s Belltown or Vanishing Seattle will occur this Friday solstice evening, 6:30-8:30 p.m., in the exotic Wallingford district at Not A Number Cards and Gifts. Can you say “last minute gift ideas for the impossible-to-please”? I knew you could.

The Moore Theatre threw a delightfully casual centennial party Monday evening. It was a textbook lesson in how to mount a fun, populist gala. It hewed to the spirit of the Moore’s original purpose as a vaudeville palace.

The above view is from the now seldom-used top balcony. Originally, this was the only part where black patrons could sit; it was accessed from a separate side entrance.

Theater personnel gave informal tours of backstage areas. Buskers performed outside and throughout the lobbies. Free drinkies and snackies abounded. Original posters and playbills hung everywhere.

Civilians were invited to consume wine and popcorn on stage, while one act after another appeared: Operetta, tap dancing, trapeze, burlesque, modern dance, standup comedy, folk music, soul music.

The night started with an old-time theater organist. It closed with a pick-up rock band, including guitarist Kurt Bloch and singer Kim Virant.

Would that all theatrical parties were this much fun. (Hint hint, Seattle Repertory Organization.)

…who attended our intimate soiree and book signing Thursday evening at M. Coy Books, celebrating the release of Seattle’s Belltown. I even got to meet longtime local arts patron Polly Friedlander.

As you might have perceived from the new image added to the top of the left-hand column, we’ve got another amazing, stupendous, enticing tome for your perusing pleasure.

Seattle’s Belltown is about exactly what you think it’s about. It covers 1.5 centuries of falling hills, rising buildings, homes, bars, theaters, hotels, P-Patches, streets, shops, and life. Get your copy now.

Our OFFICIAL PREMIERE is Thursday, December 6, 5-7 p.m., at M. COY BOOKS, 121 Pine Street. Be there or be trapezoidal.

The passing parade witnesses the demolition of the former Frederick Cadillac showroom, used more recently as the Teatro ZinZanni dinner theater, for a mega-high-rise condo project…

…and the arrival of what’s officially called the Seattle Streetcar, but is already unofficially known as the South Lake Union Trolley (for the acronymic possibilities), on a test run up Westlake Avenue. Passenger service is still tentatively scheduled to commence some time in December.

…some less than flattering words about the church that’s moving into Belltown’s Tabella nightclub space. Essentially, Lanham accuses the church and its leader of preaching hatred, homophobia, and misogyny under the guise of a youth-understanding hipster.

…Tabella is selling its space to Ballard’s Mars Hill Church. So, instead of drunken gay-bashers on Saturday nights, Western Avenue will have sober gay-denouncers on Sunday mornings. Yes, that’s an improvement.

IF ANYONE WAS AT the big and costly Hillary Clinton to-do in town Monday night, I’d love to hear about it. I do know the rightist protest scene outside Benaroya Hall wasn’t so big as it had been at her prior visits.

PARKING-LOT CZAR Joe Diamond may be dead, but he’s still a stern taskmaster. Diamond company officials earlier this month said they’d forbid tailgating parties before Seahawks football games on Diamond-owned lots. Now comes a revised edict: Go ahead and party, but don’t be seen with any booze.

SEATTLE’S MOST FAMOUS “We Never Close” restaurant is closed today. A chimney fire has shut down 13 Coins since about 4:30 a.m. Tuesday; it may reopen for tonight’s dinner shift.

IN VANISHING SEATTLE NEWS, the famous Wonder Bread neon sign will rise again, on the apartment building that’s replacing the former Central Area bakery site. Once again, the mark of wholesome blandness will draw motorists to what has traditionally been Seattle’s least whitebread neighborhood.

KUDOS TO 13-year-old Aaron Furrer of Monroe and his Guernsey heifer Dot for winning a big juniors-division prize at the World Dairy Expo in Madison, WI. Buried deep in the hereby-linked article: Furrer’s family can no longer turn a profit on their 46-acre dairy farm; his dad now works as an electrical contractor just to hold on to the land.

OVERHYPED TRAGEDY OF THE DAY: “A jury Monday convicted a former stripper turned Olympia, Wash. soccer mom in the decade-old murder of her fiance. Mechele Linehan, 35, was convicted of first-degree murder for conspiring with another fiance to kill Kent Leppink, who was shot three times in 1996 near Hope, AK. Prosecutors say Linehan wanted Leppink’s $1 million insurance policy.”

IF YOU BELIEVE what you read in the papers (or on the papers’ web sites), Shirley McLaine says Dennis Kucinich once saw a UFO outside Graham, WA. Make up your own comment here.

Got the October Belltown Messenger done. It’ll be out (and online) next week, and it’s a smash if I do say so myself (and I do).

Been working on a deal to get my old local music book Loser more available.

Been trying to teach myself at least enough programming to bring this site into the 21st century, tech-wise.

Got another little essay in the Capitol Hill Times, this one about how and why apartment and condo residents could be more sociable.

Got the August Belltown Messenger out, with three long pieces by yrs. truly.

And I’ve turned in another photo-history book to Arcadia Publishing. Seattle’s Belltown will be out in November, tentatively, and it’ll be just as fabulous as Vanishing Seattle. More on this later.

These past two weeks I’ve been hard at work on the next photo-history book, Seattle’s Belltown. (If anyone has any images of the Trade Winds, the Belltown Cafe, the original Tugs, the Weathered Wall, or the original Vogue, contact me immediately!)

…since the gruesome tragedy at Virginia Tech. I’m writing this installment from within line-O-sight of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle office, where another Deranged Loner Male (DLM) went on a destructive rampage last July, one of two fatal DLM attacks in Seattle that year.

All week, pundits and bloggers have asked how come this country not only breeds DLMs but attracts them from far-off lands. I could say a lot of things about this that don’t really matter, just like many of the pundits and bloggers have.

I could say we need more familial love and social bonding, but that would be trite.

I could say we can only stop guns with more guns, but that would be false. (And trite.)

Perhaps all I can say is this is a long-term thang.

America’s “culture of violence” ain’t going away by itself, and it ain’t going away anytime soon. It’s ingrained in the very fiber of our nation’s identity, from Wild West bad men to Southern lynch mobs to Northeast urban gangs; from bloodfest movies to pro wrestling to the verbal “shots” doled out by insult comics and talk-radio bullies.

But censoring video games and comic books won’t prevent the development of more DLMs. Indeed, the culture of repression, that oft-ignored symbiotic partner to the culture of violence, might be a more direct cause in DLM-festering. It’s repression that does a lot toward turning shy outcasts into seething would-be avengers. It’s self-repression that helps cause DLMs to lose affinity with the rest of the human species.

So let’s stop harassing the misfits. Let’s invite the lonely and the forlorn to share solace and comfort wherever it can be found–in music, in nature, in art, in everything beautiful and warm and prosocial.

Yeah, like that’s gonna be easy. Remember after the Columbine shootings, when school administrators around the country sought to track every bullied and put-upon non-jock boy, so these boys could be bullied and put-upon with official sanction?

…about the forthcoming new group online venture that will include and envelope this here bloggy thang, sometime in the next month or two. But our ol’ ideological sparring partner, Seattle Weekly founder David Brewster, has announced his new “online newspaper” Crosscut will launch in March. Already, my Belltown Messenger colleague Alex R. Mayer has his own response to Brewster’s announcement, a lighthearted spoof entitled Crosscoot.

…the past two weeks, instead of writing here:

• Selling Vanishing Seattle books. (It’s only been out less than six weeks, and the third printing is already scheduled.)
• Working temp gigs. Most recently, I was at the Convention Center during the American Library Association’s huge confab. Sorry to report, I don’t have any dirt to report about raucous librarian nights on the town. I was mostly stuck at a desk, fielding questions from exhibiting companies about their “lead retrieval” machines. (They’re magnetic-stripe readers that collect demographic info about any convention attendee who stops by a company’s display booth.)This is one of those meta business-to-business-to-business enterprises that should have been rendered obsolete long ago. But then again, the whole convention biz is something online communication should have rendered obsolete by now. Yet it’s still more-or-less going strong, propping up all sorts of industries (display designers/builders, staging crews, airlines, hotels, restaurants, hookers, cab drivers, caterers, truckers, Pike Place fish throwers, the makers of promotional swag of all sorts (backpacks, brochures, candies, water bottles, pens, golf balls)), all so dispersed people with one professional or social link can all gather F2F (that’s “face to face” in geekspeak), be collectively bored by PowerPoint slide presentations, and dine on overpriced trout almondine.

  My next such gig’s at the Boat Show. It’ll be nine straight days of, well, I never know what.

• Neglecting work on my next book, a history of bodacious Belltown, and on another update to my ebook about digital TV.
• Planning a long-way-overdue reworking of this here blog site thang. I’m not yet ready to say much about it, only that it’ll be a group endeavor with several other bloggers and journalists, and just might be the Next Big (Online) Thing.
• Putting the February Belltown Messenger together. It’ll have the first of two consecutive installments about the new Olympic Sculpture Park. One reason why: The “park” part of the park, the landscaping and the plantings, still aren’t done yet, and even those flora aspects that have been installed will look nicer the closer we get toward spring.

Following Thursday night’s local weather madness, those of us here in bodacious Belltown have gotten to enjoy the miracle that is underground wiring on this ides-of-December weekend, while the unfortunates in Wallingford, Seward Park, Bellevue, and more remote points froze in the dark for one or more nights due to the proclivities of several inconsiderate trees to get themselves strewn across power lines. It just goes to show you: There are distinct advantages to living in the middle of civilization.

THIS ISN’T TO SAY there weren’t any impacts of Windstorm 2006 in our little corner o’ the world. Downtown retailers were blessed/cursed on Dec. 15 with shoppers who couldn’t get their gifts at, say, Bellevue Square. Seattle Center, the Aquarium, etc. were stuffed with parents escorting young’uns whose schools had shut down for the day. Hotel lobbies were stuffed with stranded travelers and ordinary folk with no place else to go. Workplaces and holiday parties in town included many women who (needlessly) apologized for the inability to apply their makeup or style their hair in their de-electrified homes. Many who lived in places with power but worked in places without it got an involuntary day off. Restaurants, coffee houses, and bars serviced many customers whose fridges, coffee makers, stoves, etc. had gone phhhfft.

And, perhaps most significantly, Friday was A Day Without Newspapers. The Seattle Times Co.’s suburban plant was blacked out. No Friday P-Is were finished or distributed. A few thousand Times copies made their way to a relative few downtown stores and vending boxes.

Folks who still had the juice at home had to settle for Web sites (including those of the knocked-out newspapers), TV and radio. The disempowered had to be informed by battery radios, car radios, and hand-cranked radios, or by laptops brought to WiFi-enabled coffee houses.

(Sidebar: Apparently, the phone lines at KUOW were swamped all weekend by angry callers, justifiably miffed at the station’s on-air interviews with folks who offered power-outage survival tips but then rattled off the URLs of Web sites for more information. What, you mean everybody doesn’t have a stack of fully-charged backup laptop batteries and a satellite broadband connection?)

On Saturday, the local papers came back, but in truncated 36-page editions. That page count would have been enough to provide the regular Saturday Times and P-I “news holes,” except that the Times Co. decided to make up some of the money it had lost on Friday, and stuffed both Saturday papers full of ads. In the remaining 12 and a half or so pages, both papers’ editors crammed as much storm coverage as they could, leaving little or no space for sports, business news, editorials, comics, TV listings, puzzles, or (oddly enough) the weather.

By Sunday, the Times plant and product were back to normal. But was the civic discourse fatally disrupted? Would more folks start buying the NY Times just to get assured access to the NYT crossword? Would more readers migrate online and dump the dead-tree editions? Would that aggravate the Times Co.’s drive to kill the P-I? Will mass-market newsprint be more quickly relegated to the great recycle bin of media history? Stay tuned.

BRIEFLY IN OTHER NEWS: We must say goodbye this month to Bud Tutmarc, one of the unsung heroes of Northwest music. He’d spent most of his career as a church musical director, but in the ’50s he’d invented an improved Hawaiian-style pedal steel guitar, one of the key steps toward the electric guitars we know and love today.… Apparently the Nintendo Wii, the new video game console with handheld wireless remote controls, can be dangerous in the wrong hands. A Dec. 14 AP dispatch from Seattle reported how local player Janna Baker, during an energetic round of a Wii bowling game, flung her “Wiimote” until it “glanced off her coffee table, snapped its wrist strap, and hurtled into her flat-screen TV.” The company’s coming out with stronger wrist straps.

…fortified wine or malt liquor in Belltown as of today. Now if they’d only ban PBR, I’d be happy…