…of the first moi-edited issue of the Belltown Messenger, here are some pix I took last Thursday at the second annual Fashion 1st Boutique Fashion Show. Some 100 models showed off the wares of 16 area boutiques, most of them in Belltown.

Tom Douglas’s Palace Ballroom banquet facility was packed to the walls with an almost all-female audience. The event’s advertised hours were 6 to 9. The first two of those hours were devoted to drinking and schmoozing, before the runway saw any action.

Once the models started a-struttin’, they continued at a brisk, businesslike pace.

This model is selling Ottica eyewear. (What else?)

And here’s the organizer of this year’s event, Joan Kelly, with a spokesman from the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, which got a percentage of the $40 ticket price and the $120 “trash belts” being sold in the lobby. The event was dedicated to its first-year organizer, Jared Seegmiller, who’d died earlier this year after a brief bout with a rare form of heart cancer.

…posted any original content on this site in a week. I can be like that, especially when I’m on multiple deadlines on paying projects like I am now.

But there’s good news. The reinvention of the Belltown Messenger continues apace. Not all our planned changes will necessarily make it into the September issue, but they’ll get in eventually.

…the anniversary of the original French Revolution, was celebrated on Thursday in Post Alley by the kind folk at Cafe Campagne.

Highlighting the spirited fate was a rousing cancan dance show by members of the Atomic Bombshells burlesque troupe. Their spirited, athletic performance totally belied a recent Stranger essay that defined neo-burlesque as primarily a tool for boosting the performers’ egos, not for entertaining audiences. These dancers are pure entertainers of the highest order.

Please remember two things about France:

• They helped us in the Revolutionary War, and really tried to dissuade us from the mega-folly that is the current war-without-end;
• They gained and lost democracy a couple of times. Let’s not let that happen here.

…an electrical fire closed the Speakeasy Cafe forever, the building that housed Seattle’s first Internet cafe (and the final incarnation of the 211 Club billiard parlor) was finally demolished.

According to street rumors, the building owners had made every attempt at a rehab/reconstruction plan. But, as these pix show, the ol’ structure was too far gone. In its place will come yet another mixed-use development.

…the stories of a would-be suicide bomber at the new Seattle U.S. Courthouse, I immediately thought of Perry Manley. My ol’ acquaintance Cydney Gillis had run into Manley a month or so ago. She wrote for Real Change about Manley’s crusade to abolish child support. Read her story and get an insight into a mind crippled by an all-encompassing obsession.

…a few freelance deadlines out of the way. (Oh, it’s so nice to finally have work coming in again, after a nearly two-year drought!) So I’ll take a few moments to describe my new (or is it “neo-“?) life in Belltown.

I’m at the Nexxus Caffé on Second Avenue this morning. I’m staring out the window, watching the post-rush-hour pedestrians about their business. The young Japanese women attending the Art Institute. The down-and-outers looking for the unemployment office (it moved to the new YWCA shelter building on Third). The condo construction crews on smoke breaks. The Pike Place Market tourists who’ve finally found a parking space. The mixed-race couples toting plastic blue baby strollers. The bicycle messengers laden with bright yellow backpacks. The homeless men trudging worn-out large garbage bags. The lunch crews from upscale restaurants reporting for work, allowing themselves one last moment of honest faces before they have to play perky. Truckers delivering big sacks of potatoes and onions to the upscale restaurants. Crinkly-faced but impeccably-dressed old men. Day-care leaders herding small packs of barely-walking-age children. Young black men hiding their bodies within oversize athletic wear, hiding their minds within iPods. Well-preserved women cooing their way out of the day spas. The loving boyfriend of an former unrequited crush of mine, grabbing to-go portions of coffee and muffins for a long day of computer-jockeying.

Later in the day, I’ll be likely to see the shoppers toting huge bags bearing the logo of The-Store-Formerly-Known-As-The-Bon-Marché. Sullen suburban teens lining up at the Moore; indie-rock shoegazers lining up at the Crocodile. Overgrown fratboys strutting and shouting their way toward the First Avenue bars. Sonics fans, full of hope and alcohol, on their way to the arena or the sports bars. Upscale restaurant diners shouting business deals and/or babysitter instructions into cell phones. The Lava Lounge/Shorty’s/Rendezvous/Mama’s/Whiskey Bar crowd, cavorting and flirting and gossipping along their moveable feast.

In the almost three weeks I’ve been back in Belltown, this is the first time I’ve been outside this early. I’ll have to make it a habit. This passing parade is a lot more fun than any dumb ol’ judge show, and I can make up my own storylines.

In other personal news, I’m now more or less completely unpacked and moved in. Housewarming party news will follow.

Updating on any regular basis will resume next week, once the Net connection’s hooked up at the new place. I’ve successfully moved back into beautiful bodacious Belltown. I’m feeling great about it. The only snag so far: My brother had to quit early on moving day due to that nasty cold bug that’s going around, so I have to get ten boxes’ worth of stuff, plus an awkwardly large computer desk, out of the old place before the sale officially closes this evening.

…the onetime Seattle illusttator-cartoonist known for her “Victorian Lowbrow” art and her triangle-slash logo, now has a website full of artowrk, cool ephemera for sale, and remembrances about the crazy days of old Belltown.

…harps that self-proclaimed “born again Christians” today are often just as non-monogamous, money-obsessed, and otherwise un-pious as everybody else.

What this guy sees as a scandal, I see as a sign of hope and faith. We’re all just plain ol’ humans on this planet. Nobody’s all that superior to anybody else. It’s not doctrine or ideology that’s gonna “save” us; it’s how we take care of ourselves and one another.

Which is what I should’ve told the guy who stalked me across Belltown on Sunday morning.

I was wandering the sidewalks, snapping pix of the rapidly disappearing snow. Suddenly, outside the Crocodile, a clean cut young man with steely eyes and a rigid smile stood in front of me. “Good morning. Have you heard about Jesus?”

I could have told him the line by the guy in the original Swept Away, who, upon finding a crucifix on the desert island, grumbles that Jesus is everywhere, just like Coca-Cola. But instead I smiled and said, “Of course,” and walked away.

“I hope he sees you in heaven.”

“I’m sure I will.” (I declined the temptation to add, “I’ll tell him ‘hi’ for you.”)

He followed me east on Blanchard. He yelled, “You have an evil spirit. A rebellious spirit. It must be made right.”

I ignored him, forgetting the painful lesson I’d learned on childhood playgrounds: Ignoring bullies doesn’t stop them. It just makes them harrangue you worse.

I sprinted onto Third Avenue. He followed.

I darted into Dan’s Belltown Grocery. He followed. He confronted me by the frozen pizzas. “Would you like to go to church today?”

“I do sometimes. But it’s to a church of my choice.”

“What would that church be?”

“Either the University Friends Center or the Church of New Thought in Laurelhurst.”

He mumbled something about the need to beware of false churches (presumably meaning all other than his own).

I strode out of the store and back onto Third. I darted across the street, hoping to snag myself a table for one at Ralph’s or Top Pot. He finally walked in a different direction.

I now know I shouldn’t have been as obsessed as I was with my own selfish, egoic privacy. I should have talked nicer to him. I should have asked him to consider the benefits of trading his narrow-minded sense of mistaken certainty for the universe-expanding adventure of doubt, a world (and a God) bigger than any of our own finite minds can imagine.

Specifically, un-themed floats, clowns, and pirates.

I’ve no idea what this critter is, except that it belongs to the Group Health Credit Union.

IT’S THE THIRD AND LAST PART of our look at the LGBT Pride rally/parade. Yesterday we saw the gents; today it’s the ladies.

The Pride festival’s officially all about forthrightly declaring one’s sexuality, no matter what people say.

So I’ll forthrightly declare: I mainly go to Pride to enjoy the presence of the women.

The fact that the women are mostly lesbians (with a few bis and post-op trannies mixed in) matters not one atom.

In my long life, I’ve viewed and adored thousands of women who didn’t want to have sex with me. From this point-O-view, lesbians are merely one subset.

Like a Medieval troubadour toward a lady of the court, my attraction to the Pride Parade lesbians is both defined and enhanced by knowing my desire probably won’t be physically consummated.

Rather, I can only express my admiration and my yearning as artistically as I can, and trust that, at least on some level, these strong women can gratefully accept my highest regard for their faces, their bodies, and their courageous hearts.

Of course, should any one of these women turn out to be bi (or het-curious), and find herself reading this, I would love the chance to channel this high adoration toward a lower plane.

IT’S PART 2 OF 3 of our documentin’ last Sunday’s LGBT Pride Parade.

Today, we separate the boys from the girls, since that’s what gaydom essentially does.

The prime contradiction of the “gender diversity” and gay-rights movements is that they (rightfully) demand society welcome a broader range of gender-types and relationship-types, yet the most common of these uncommon sexualities is that of men who prefer to smooch it up with their fellow men. William Burroughs and other commentators have noted over the years that male-gaydom isn’t a weaker or sissier masculinity but a more exclusive masculinity. It’s manhood uncompromised by the need to live with, or satisfy, women.

Given that, of course, there are still many, many types of man-loving men and man-and-man relationships. I predict that even when (not if) gay-tolerance finally spreads out to the vast suburban and rural stretches of this country, gays will still choose to congregate in the major cities, because only in a large population base (or via net-dating) will a pseudo-Eurotrash fashion victim in search of a leather-bondage cowboy be likely to discover his soulmate.

But then again, bifurcating and bisecting’s what U.S. society seems to be all about these days. We’re (including my own het-self) spinning out into ever-narrower subcultural niches. In this regard, it’s commendable that the Pride people have kept so many queer-culture subsectors involved all these years.

Among these subsectors: Drag afficianados. If we’re to believe the papers, drag-queen performance, on both pro and amateur levels, is significantly less popular than it had been in the ’90s. Still, for those who truly care for the art form, it’s never mattered whether it was considered “in” or “out.”

On his net-radio talk show Sex Life, local “sexpert” Dane Ballard recently discussed why the Pride Parade seems to have become passe to many local gays. You can hear it all here, once the archive file’s been placed online (which should be as early as today).

By the way, ’twas nice that the Seafair Pirates showed up. For some fifty years, the Pirates have represented a just slightly more acceptable image of rowdy male bonding, in a town that’s spent the past century trying to distance itself from its rough-hewn frontier past.

SOME RANDOM STREET IMAGES this Photo Phriday, starting with the lovely statue put up last year atop the former Speakeasy Cafe building (which is otherwise still hardly improved upon since it was gutted by fire nearly three years ago).

THOSE OF YOU who live in easy proximity to downtown Seattle may read the newest incarnation of the print MISC, a column in the monthly Belltown Messenger tabloid. It’s free to pick up at the Two Bells bar, BBC Studio/Ola Wyola Boutique, and several other dropoff points. That column was compiled from items that appeared on this site in the past month or so; any future installments with original material will be posted here.

WITH ONE DAY TO GO in National Novel Writing Month, I’ve posted five more chapters to my successful entry The Myrtle of Venus to this site. As usual, the story starts at this link. The just-posted scenes start at this link.

The final sixteen chapters will be available here sometime within the next week.

…a hopeful mood and awful music.

This morning I experienced a lousy mood and terrific music.

I deliberately stayed away from election-nite coverage, instead watching the surprisingly good Sonics win their fourth straight basketball game. Then I stopped by the new Carpenters’ Hall in Belltown. (The old hall had been razed several years ago for a high-rise condo, incorporating the smaller new union hall.) There, the monorail campaigners held their party. The aforementioned awful music was provided by a lowest-common-denominator “blooze” band, churning out tedious arrangements of the tritest ’60s-nostalgia hits.

(Memo to all campaign organizers: Progressive politics isn’t just for Big Chillers anymore.)

But aside from that, it was a triumphal evening. Asking taxpayers to make a major investment during tuff economic times is always a challenge. (Note the inglorious defeat of the statewide highway levy.) But despite that, and despite the powers-that-be’s smear and scare campaigns, the monorail referendum achieved a solid lead in the polls, pending the late absentees. The city came together to create a better future for itself, in the form of a tourist-friendly commuter system (or a commuter-friendly tourist attraction).

Then in the morning came the horrible news. The GOP goon squad held onto the U.S. House and had regained at least a tie in the Senate. This means the Consitution-busters, the domestic enemies of freedom, have a rubber-stamp Congress to pass any roughshod legislation, appoint any crook, and give away the whole country to the billionaires.

Of course, the Democrats hadn’t provided much of a hindrance to these schemes anyway. Maybe this second-straight electoral debacle will, once and for all, finally discredit the Democratic Leadership Council and its Right Lite policy of subjugation.

The terrific music that cheered me up today came from the previously discredited Trio cable channel. This morning it showed one of the hundreds of British music shows in its library. This particular hour compiled old performance footage by scads of early punk legends (Sex Pistols, Clash, Jam, Iggy, Siouxsie, Joy Division, Buzzcocks, Undertones). It all cheered me up immensely.

You have every right to ask why I’d frown at 1967 nostalgia music but grin at 1977 nostalgia music. Well, there’s a reason. The band at the monorail party interpreted old Beatles and Stones numbers into slowed-down, dumbed-down exercises in collective self-congratulation. The live performances in the punk documentary were brisk, brash statements of mass resistance. The Thatcher and Reagan regimes (like the Bush regime today, only slightly less stupidly) were on jugggernauts to redistribute wealth upward, to spread war and poverty, to make the world safe for corporate graft. Punk rock, at its best, was one big loud defiant NO! to the whole reactionary worldview.

(Progressive politics isn’t just for slam-dancers anymore either. But punk’s classic note of rejecting the given situation, and creating/demanding a more human-scale world, is something we could all use a lot more of now.)