…about doing this local-culture reportage thang for two decades will have to wait. I’m on multiple deadlines this week, including an attempt for the Belltown Messenger to write about condo living for people who don’t necessarily have capped teeth or square jaws.

(The following is what I’ve written for this week’s Capitol Hill Times.)

I’m hosting a big shindig on Thursday, June 15, and I hope you’ll show for it. It’s at the Rendezvous Grotto (2320 2nd Ave.) and it’s called “The 20th MISCiversary.”

Twenty years ago this week, I started a little column in a little monthly paper based out of Belltown.

In those months and years since, I’ve watched a lot of people, places, and things come and go.

I saw the Seattle rock scene declared dead on at least a dozen occasions. But it refuses to go away; despite the occasional attempts by politicians and the record industry to kill it off for good.

I’ve seen downtown housing go from almost extinct to a hi-growth industry.

I’ve seen local politics pretty much stay the same, with the usual “downtown vs. neighborhoods” and development vs. preservation arguments repeated like a familiar jingle.

Speaking of jingles, 20 years ago commercial radio didn’t quite suck as awfully as it does now. Cable TV was still a novelty. (Remember when music videos were widely derided as a threat to real rock? Heck, remember music videos?)

Yes, Virginia, there was online communication in 1986. It was in the form of dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSs), running off of the home PCs of their respective systems operators (“sysops”).

I resided then in the Consulate Apartments on Belmont. It was the first post-college abode I’d managed to stay in for longer than six months. The manager at the time was a flamboyant yet cynical gay guy who, unfortunately for me, parked his motorcycle directly beneath my unit; prior to his late-night treks to Chinese restaurants, he’d be revvin’ up the thing for a good five to ten loud minutes. He’d installed a Dymo Labelmaker sign inside the back door: “Don’t let strange people in. We have plenty.”

The bar at the end of that block, now Kincora’s, was then a notorious dive tavern called Glynn’s Cove. When I got my first non-toy computer, I snuck it in via the back door so as not to let any Glynn’s patrons learn I had something worth stealing.

There were reasons for this concern. The Pike-Pine corridor’s sidewalks were frequented day and evening by drug dealers/users, aggressive panhandlers, and streetwalkers of all genders. Today’s fashionable foot traffic in the area was much sparser. There was no Linda’s, no War Room, no Capitol Club, no Rudy’s, no Cha Cha, no Six Arms, no Area 51, no Manray, no Neumo, no Harvard Market, no Elysian. There were gay bars, though fewer than nowadays; one of them had the slogan DARE TO BE DIFFERENT posted outside and a six-foot-long dress code posted just inside.

Some places that were here on the Hill then are still around now, but different. There was the Fred Meyer Marketime that became Broadway Market that became QFC. Today’s City Market was Mallstrom’s Market, whose beer racks bore the warning “No ID, no beer—even if you ‘just live up the street.'”

And there were a lot of neighborhood landmarks that are just gone now.

All the low-budget, low-rent, low-pretension hangouts, where the menus were still printed with dollar signs and nothing was listed under the rubric MARKET PRICE. Ernie Steele’s. Lion O’Reilley’s. The Broadway Coffee Shop. Andy’s Cafe. The Cause Celebre Cafe. Pizza Pete.

Shopping in the neighborhood was less about unique knick-knacks, more about practicality. There was the First Hill Thriftway (later Shop-Rite), perhaps the Platonic ideal of a small indie supermarket. A Different Drummer Books. Hardware and home-electronics stores. The still-missed City Peoples Mercantile.

I can’t even begin to talk about the disappeared arts institutions. The former Empty Space Theater on East Pike (a mild walk from the new Empty Space at Seattle University, three “spaces” later). The original 911 Media Center, descended from the multimedia producing organization and/or. All the gallery and exhibition sites that have come and gone during the intervening years, from the Vox Populi Gallery to the Union Garage. The Apple Theater (which was still showing new pornos in ’86; its supply of shot-on-film product soon ceased, but it reran the old films for another decade). The Broadway Theater.

I’m putting a book together about this “Vanishing Seattle,” the city of funky humor and rough-hewn honesty that’s increasingly displaced by the newfangled upscale-luxury everything. I’m looking for photos and mementos of beloved former local stores, restaurants, celebrities, bars, buildings, bridges, and Bubbleators. If you’ve got any, let me know with an email to vanish@miscmedia.com. (All items will be promptly returned.)

…the fab June Belltown Messenger is now out. It’s got many fun features you read here first; plus food, fashion, fiction, and fun.

• “The Star Wars Guy” succumbs to his own personal demons.
• The Belltown Messenger‘s own Ronald Holden wrote a letter to the P-I thanking its editors for their recent anti-censorship statement. His letter got censored.
• Now that China’s prez has moved on to the Other Washington, here are all the “Hu” puns you’ll ever need.
• The ’05-’06 Sonics season was softball on the court, hardball at City Hall. (How I’d resolve this: Let the Sonics buy out the Fun Forest’s operators, move those attractions to the west and north sides of KeyArena (though preserving the Snoqualmie Room for the Vera Project’s all-ages rock shows), and have the city revamp the current Fun Forest indoor amusement arcade into new meeting and exhibition rooms.)

• The April Belltown Messenger is finally out, delayed due to equipment installation at the printer. It’s got a big essay by me comparing five of the neighborhood’s churches on an aesthetic/cultural level.
• Should antiwar activists learn to think more like warriors?
• Imani Mance asserts, meanwhile, that “activists can no longer afford to be broke.”
• Peter Steinbrueck dislikes the new development rules that allow more highrise towers with nothing but blank walls at the sidewalk level.
• The NY Times has scrapped the dozen or so pages of stock prices that used to fill its back section, figuring anybody who really wants them can find them online. Now, if they’ll only start printing the investment data that really counts these days–the going rates on eBay for role-playing-game “strength points.”
• If Mac computers can now seamlessly run Windows, how will software companies still be persuaded to write applications for Mac OS?
• We apparently missed the demise of Dark Shadows creator and Night Stalker producer Dan Curtis.
• But we did catch the death notice of George Carlson, a real-estate executive who dabbled in television. His show, known locally as Northwest Traveler and syndicated as simply The Traveler, ran once a week at 7 p.m. for 13 years. The show was a simple travelogue. Carlson, in the studio, would interview some local affluent couple, who then narrated 16mm film footage of their last trip to India, Egypt, Taiwan, or some other place where the natives don’t even speak the same language we do. Because this footage was silent, Carlson stuck syrupy library music behind the narration. It was all a relic of a simpler time, one might say.
• Bill Nye the Science Guy goes to Waco, TX; gets a silent protest when he politely disses creationism.
• If you’re going out Friday in Seattle, you might consider attending the book tour by leading progressive bloggers Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Jerome Armstrong, plugging their political repair manual Crashing the Gate. They’re speaking at 7 p.m. at the Labor Temple, 2800 1st Ave. On the Eastside, they’ll be at Marymoor Park at 11:30 a.m. Saturday. Be there. Aloha.

Sleep. Take a staggering variety of cold/flu medications. Sleep. Refrain from eating, in whole or in part. Consume bag after bag of store-brand cough drops. Listen to people tell me everybody’s been getting this debilitating bug, whatever it is. Make bad puns about the bird flu (“Of course it did; it didn’t walk!”). Cough up substances you don’t want me to describe, in mass quantities. Skip out on about half a dozen meetups, parties, Belltown Messenger interviews, etc. Sleep. Briefly attend a Drinking Liberally meeting at which I hear King County Executive Ron Sims talk informally about tying in any KeyArena rebuild with a larger Seattle Center makeover (he gave no specific suggestions as to what he’d like to add or delete from the complex). Sleep.

While the world was passing me by, an odd li’l Stranger essay suggested we might as well go ahead and let the Seattle Post-Intelligencer die. I, of course, utterly disagree. Ideally, I’d like the P-I to come out of its joint operating agreement with the SeaTimes as a viable, fully-independent, full-size daily. If that can’t be achieved, there are other options for keeping Seattle a two-daily town:

• Keep the JOA more or less as it is. If this is even feasible now (the Times says it isn’t), it might not be in a few years, as the new electronic media continue to drain ad revenue away from ol’ newsprint.
• Turn the P-I into an online-only operation, as the Stranger piece suggested. Intriguing but ultimately insufficient. There’s still not enough money in Net ads to support a local, mass-market operation employing 100 or more full-time journalists. One day, the money might be there.
• Turn the P-I into a separately-run section within the Times, like the current three pages of P-I Focus within the Sunday Times. The Las Vegas JOA was renegotiated a few years back, turning the Las Vegas Sun into a six- to ten-page features section within each day’s Las Vegas Review-Journal. Such an insert section might include strictly local news, features, and opinion pieces; leaving the Times itself to run stock tables, weather, sports stats, TV listings, comics, puzzles, wire copy, and syndicated columns. Such a solution would keep the P-I‘s “voice” in the public eye, albeit as a “kept” dependent to the Times.
• Turn the P-I into a freebie tabloid, either within or outside of a JOA. Free mini-dailies began in Europe in the ’90s, and are now found in a handful of U.S. cities (NYC, Chicago, Frisco, DC, Philly). They tend to be scrawny li’l things, offering the same content as regular dailies but far less of each department.Still, they provide the best current hope for a rethinking of the whole newspaper concept. Today’s big-city dailies have the same content mix they had 50 years ago, only they’ve gotten duller. There’s no absolute reason why we still have to have full local, world, sports, business, and “living” sections in every paper. There’s no reason except tradition to still print stock prices, or for the comics page to be two dozen tiny, mostly unimaginative, gag strips.

As I’ve written a few times before, the prospect of a post-JOA P-I allows all of us news fans to imagine a new type of paper for a new century. Let’s keep the imagining going. If the P-I doesn’t morph into our brave new paper, let’s start it up ourselves.

…the rich condo dudes to gain the city’s attention about the inhospitable hospitality circuit that is First Avenue late Saturday nights, so be it.

…but the January Belltown Messenger is now out, complete with a big cover story and pix by yrs. truly.

Also, Messenger correspondent Megan Lee will be on KOMO-TV’s Northwest Afternoon this Friday at 3, as part of a story about “The Truth About Tabloids.”

I’m only able to write this now because Diane Larson, the veteran UPS driver who services a stretch of Belltown, fended off two would-be shoulder-bag robbers until they fled. Otherwise, I’d be without the computer on which I write this.

That happened around 12:45 p.m. Wednesday. Later, in the Two Bells (where I told Diane I would be after I thanked her for her help), I told a uniformed cop (with a plainchothes detective standing behind him) what had happened.

I’d just been to the bank, and was walking north on Fourth Avenue toward the Two Bells for lunch. I was thinking this solstice day was the first day of the rest of my life–that from this day on, I vowed, I’d have no more financial worries, no career worries, no stress. I would have to say goodbye to my old existence of being waylaid by constant panic.

Then, out of my peripheral vision, a stringy-haired, unshaven white guy person lunged toward me, cornered me against the wall near the Chinese Wok restaurant, and grabbed at my shoulder bag (containing, among many other things, this laptop). I held onto the bag for dear life (no pipsqueak punk does THAT to ME!) and yelled “NOOOO!” repeatedly.

A stocky black guy from across the street ran toward me and the crook, yelling “I got it. I can handle it.” Instead of helping me fend off the crook, he lunged for the bag himself. (He might or might not have been a mate of crook #1.)

I held onto it like it was part of me (the computer is, of course, my most intimate tool and even an extension of my mind). A half dozen Chinese Wok patrons came out to yell at the crooks but did nothing more.

Then Diane came, stomped her foot on the fallen bag to keep it in place, and held both crooks at bay until they chose to run off.

That, my friend, is what Brown can do for me.

I learned: For a self-styled lifelong passive weakling/wuss, when I have to I can be as feisty and ornery as my Snohomish County bad-boy upbringing has reared me to be. I’m also good at making a spectacle of myself; my stubborn “NOOO,” one of many frustration catch phrases which have often cused others to dismiss me as a weirdo and a freak, effectively helped save my ass. I’m a fighter. I’m a survivor. I triumph against all odds. I’m a “real man,” damn it.

While I couldn’t give a good enough description of the crooks for the cops (who told me “tunnel vision” often occurs in people at moments of sudden panic), I still remember the steely, desperate, focused evil look of the first would-be thief, and how he instantly turned into a running coward when he knew he’d lost.

Some guy in The Nation a few years back wrote about having been mugged in New Haven, CT. He said that, far from turning his back on urban society and wanting to cocoon in the burbs, he was grateful his crime took place in a city, where passersby were immediately there to help him and where emergency-room care was only minutes away.

I feel likewise today. If I’d been mugged in Woodinville (and, yes, it happens), I’d have been stuck one-to-two against the muggers with no one to hear me for miles. Heck, if it’d happened in one of the nether regions of West Seattle where I sometimes find myself wandering off of buses, I’d have been TSOL.

I also can’t stop thinking of the thieves, not as the opposite-race subhumans the conservatives would claim to protect me from, but as right-wingers without resources. These dorks wanted to take my stuff for no good reason, offering nothing in return, just because they believed they had the power to do so.

…has fingered the real culprit in the music industry’s steady downturn—DVDs. The arrival of film as a home-library product, Norman Lebrecht claims, means “it has left the cinema and joined us for drinks, an emancipatory moment for the last of the great western art forms…. The DVD won’t replace the printed book which has withstood more serious threats in the past half-millennium. But it will accelerate the obsolescence of the audio-only disc, which cannot compete much longer in an image-centred culture.”

THE NOVEMBER BELLTOWN MESSENGER is out at last, and may be our best yet. Read it online or seek it at more than 100 dropoff spots.

RAIN HAS ARRIVED SERIOUSLY in greater Puget Sound this morning, meaning the fourth category of autumnal transition has also arrived. (The prior three stages of fall: Labor Day weekend, the equinox, and the “fall back” to Standard Time.)

The grey has settled in. The washed-out watercolor look will be with us, with occasional sunbreaks, for the next three and a half months or so. This is what breaks the spirits of Californians and proves the mettle of real Nor’Westers. Can you take it?

…instead of writing to this Web site:

• Finished the fourth edited draft of my forthcoming ebook, Take Control of Digital TV. It’s gonna be a blast when it comes out, which will be before the end of the year.
• Finished the gorgeous November Belltown Messenger. It should be out this weekend, at all the usual dropoff spots.
• Recovering from one of them there eight-day cold or flu bugs. A nasty li’l bugger this one was. Last Friday and Saturday, when I was barely staying awake for an hour or two at a time, I was reminded of my father’s sleepy final years.
• Waited on a new day job, which I hope will appear damn soon. Otherwise, it’s the return of desperate fiscal straits, a situation I’m damned sick and tired of, as much as I’m sick of being tired and tired of being sick.

Immediately after the new Belltown Messenger came out, I buried myself into a freelance project that won’t see the bright light o’ day for another month. So here are some of the things that have happened this past week or so:

RONNIE BARKER, RIP: In the early ’80s, during one of my many long-term bouts with chronic depression, I became utterly fond of the Two Ronnies sketch comedy show, which KING-TV had picked up (yes, a BBC show airing an American commercial station, albeit at 2:30 a.m. or some such.) The station had just introduced 24-hour telecasting (the first in Seattle to do so), filling up the wee hours with moldie-oldie movies, repeats of the 11 p.m. news, and BBC imports brought over here by Time-Life Television. The Two Ronnies was the best of this motley schedule. It featured cute skits, whimsical monologue stories by Barker’s partner Ronnie Corbett, and fake news bits aqt the beginning and end that relied on time-tested comedy shticks and wordplay rather than anything “topical.” Barker was a genius. And now, as he would say, “It’s goodnight from him.”

AUGUST WILSON, RIP: With the beloved playwright’s demise, Rebecca Wells now ascends to the niche title of the best writer living in Seattle who never writes about Seattle.

STRIP UPDATE: Because a judge stopped ’em from maintaining a permanent “temporary moratorium” on new adult entertainment clubs, the Seattle City Council adopted a draconian set of restrictions on how they can operate. Like the late, unlamented Teen Dance Ordinance of the mid-’90s, this is a not-so-thinly disguised attempt to harass an unwanted entertainment genre into nonexistence. A Reuters dispatch claimed the move was ironic in the face of Seattle’s “liberal,” “tolerant” reputation.

I could’ve told ’em different.

What the nation sees as our supposed blue-state radicalism is really baby-boomer smugness; i.e., just another kind of conservatism. We’re a city whose sociocultural establishment thinks glass bowls are “art” and easy-listening sax solos are “jazz.” We’re a city that loves “diversity,” as long as it’s limited to upscale white women, upscale white gays, and dead black musicians.

We’re a city that only tolerates sex if that scary-sticky-gooey topic can be subsumed under a more acceptable rubric such as individual “empowerment.” So we embrace a certain peep-show parlor where a thick glass curtain keeps the genders neatly apart; but an establishment where women and (gasp!) men could share the same space, even (shudder!) touch one another? Must be stopped!

At least there’s some solace that four City Council members bravely voted against the ban-in-all-but-name, and that affected entrepreneurs are already planning to take the city to court.

…hardly written a thing for this site this week. But wait ’til you see what I have done, specifically the orangey October Belltown Messenger! It’s even more fab than the previous ish, complete with yummy color photos by yrs. truly. Distro starts today at over 100 dropoff spots.

…upon the Puget Sound basin. A few deciduous-tree leaves have already begun to turn color. A graceful, tasteful cloud cover has provided its natural sunscreen the past several mornings. Temperatures have become, well, more temperate. And sundown is again greeting us before 8 p.m. It’s a wonderful time to be alive in this, thankfully hurricane-free, segment of the globe.

And the perfect accessory for autumnal living has arrived. I speak, of course, of the fabulous new Belltown Messenger newspaper. It’s a small one, but packed with infotainment at its most infotaining, including three (count ’em) text pieces and seven glorious b/w photos by yrs. truly. Pick one up at a dropoff spot near you, or read online.

The first issue of the new-look Belltown Messenger will be off to the printer on Monday. Editing the various texts and contriving the paper’s redesign has meant the first full work week I’ve had in more than a year, and it’s felt good (both the working and the end work). It’s still just a small monthly tab, but I hope to help it grow.