Arcade, the Northwest architecture and design quarterly, devoted its summer issue to environmental themes.

But instead of hyping new “green” buildings and products, many of the issue’s essays (guest-edited by Charles Mudede and Jonathan Golob) propose a world with fewer buildings and products.

Granted, this year we’re not adding too much to the total world supply of them.

This is particularly the case with California professor Barry Katz’s closing piece, “The Promise of Recession.” Katz remembers how past designers such as William Morris sought to influence the world by promoting an honest, simple aesthetic. Then Katz imagines a near-future in which “every act of production and consumption stabilizes, or even adds to, our collective natural assets.”

This, he believes, means a lot fewer new products (of all kinds), hence a lot fewer people employed to design those products. But there would be work for “post-designers.” Some of these would revamp the already-built world to be more sustainable and more nature-friendly. Others would devise “an ecology of information, thinning the festering datamass and rehabilitating the printed page.”

Similar themes are posited by Golob in “Green On Wheels.” He argues that today’s gasoline-powered automobiles are just about as efficient as they can ever be, when you figure in the costs of refining and transporting the fuel. No, Golob avers, “carrying about two hundred pounds of human being in four thousand pounds of boxy steel, glass and aluminum” is an activity whose time will soon pass, by necessity, whether we like it or not.

Also in the issue:

• Three fantasy illustrations by Jed Dunkerly, depicting speculative attempts at “Engineering the Environment”—using sky-bound sprinkler systems to rain on farmland, using offshore “wind rigs” to alter air currents, and using construction cranes to plant fully-grown trees.
• Nicholas Veroli on the meaning of “catastrophe,” and whether any situation (including the present environmental crisis) can be called one before it’s past-tense.
• Erin Kendig on Krazy!, a book documenting last year’s Vancouver Art Gallery exhibit exploring the surrealistic sides of comics, animation, and related arts.
• Jim Cava reviewing Tony Fry’s book Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice. Cava agrees with Fry’s assertion that the constant making and selling of what Cava calls “unnecessary consumables” is bad for the planet, no matter how “green” any individual product is claimed to be. Fry and Cava insist we need to redesign our whole consumerist culture, not merely individual consumer products.

If we take Fry’s case (and those of the other Arcade contributors) seriously, the human-built environment will change. It’s not just unwise to keep going the way we’ve gone this past century, it’s impossible.

The only question is what we’ll change into.

…this fine day to CompuServe. The pioneering online service (founded in the pre-home-computer days of 1969!) was shut down last week by its final owner, AOL (which isn’t doing that great itself these days).

…Where you can get your energy-saving TV, your energy-saving washing machine, and, soon, your energy-saving transport vehicle.

…And, one guy claims, the TV business will soon follow.

…there’s still one corporate art collector still anxious to buy stuff–the Ripley’s Believe It or Not museums.

Back in the days of vinyl and even beyond, the University District was the record-store capitol of the region. That’s where such once-mighty industry players as Budget Tapes & Records, Discount Records, Tower, Peaches, and The Wherehouse all purveyed the big (later little) plastic discs bearing assorted types of beautiful noise.

That era ends this month. That’s when the District’s last specialty new music store, Cellophane Square, gives up the good fight it’s fought since 1972.

At its original location on NE 42nd, and later in more spacious digs on upper University Way, Cellophane Square was a lot more than a retailer. It was a community center, a hangout, an information exchange.

This was particularly true during the 1979-91 era of the punk underground, when Seattle’s civic cultural establishment sneered at any musical act younger or flashier than the Eagles. Cellophane Square was where we learned which bands were touring, which bands were breaking up, and which bands needed a new drummer. It was where we got the domestic zines and the UK music mags. It was where we got those oh-so-rare (even then!) import-only releases by American bands.

There will still be a few new CDs at the University Book Store, and a lot of used discs at 2nd Time Around. But the scene just won’t be the same.

…what the odd temporary readerboard sign for a Hal Ashby film festival was doing up outside the Showbox one day last week, we now know. It was part of a Target TV commercial with Pearl Jam. Really.

• Joel Connelly doesn’t like the idea of still more street construction in Belltown, worrying that all these closed lanes and parking spaces could fatally disrupt business, especially if Nickels’s “park boulevard” idea (reducing Bell Street to one lane of traffic and plaza-izing the rest) goes through. I believe if Bell’s gonna be revamped, it might as well be done now, while all this other work is already going on on or near it.
• Our favorite expert on the domestic automotive collapse, Michael Moore, says good riddance to the old General Motors. (Say, since we the U.S. taxpayers now own the company, let’s bring back the Geo! And let’s make us some of those hi-speed passenger trains, too, OK?)
• As the Chase-ification of Washington Mutual nears completion, a lot of WaMu ATM cards have stopped working. The possible culprit: Chase’s deal to switch WaMu’s debit card handling services from MasterCard to Visa.
• Seattle Business Monthly depicts the Seattle Times-owning Blethen family as a dysfunctional clan worthy of soap-opera depiction.
• Our pals at the local news site PubliCola have some real investment behind them now, thanks to Greg Smith, the real estate developer who almost ran for mayor this year. Yeah, he almost ran against Greg Nickels, for whom PubliCola cofounder Sandeep Kaushik now does campaign PR.
• And the equally fine folks at another local news site, Seattle PostGlobe, have published another photo essay by yr. intrepid c’r’s’p’n’d’t. It’s all about the demise of the Summit K-12 alternative public school.

…these online “abstracts” of New Yorker articles better than the articles themselves.

…at the top of this article about the self-publishing book boom is a startling statistic. Between self- and corporately-published titles, one book was published last year for every 500 Americans. Not one copy sold, but one whole work created. And this doesn’t count works issued solely online or as ebooks.

…around here, that were merged into Verizon in 2000, will now be sold off to Frontier Communications. The AP story hereby linked refers to Frontier as a company that focuses “on serving small towns and rural areas.” As if Redmond and Lynnwood still fit that description.

But I’ve a less hectic day-work schedule this week, so let’s try to catch up on the recent news:

• Microsoft’s new on-campus mall includes a miniature, officially licensed “Pike Place Market” area. Like all of the MS “Commons,” it’s open only to MS employees and guests. This is wrong on more levels than I want to enumerate here, but I’ll settle for just a few concerns: Does it include the Athenian Inn? Farmer-run produce stalls? The magic shop?
• 
  Can you dig it?: It’s official. The Alaskan Way Viaduct will be replaced by a tubular hole in the ground beneath First Avenue, a hole which won’t have exits to downtown or Belltown. Bah.
• 
  Otherwise, our Democratic-controlled Legislature behaved very GOP-esque. It passed an all-cuts budget, decimated social services, and quietly shut down any talk about making our state tax system less regressive.
• 
  Sand clogs the pipes at the Magnolia sewer plant, due to all the sand put on city roads last December. Hey, let’s make a new artificial beach!
• 
  GM to dump thousands of jobs, hundreds of dealers, and the whole of Pontiac. (Oh yeah, Saturn and Hummer are gong away too; but my urban-hipster conditioning prevents me from mourning Hummer, and I’m too old to have any teenage memories of cruising the strip-mall roads in a Saturn.)
• 
  Sounders FC’s off to a smashing start; while the Mariners approach their ’01 glory days. Nice.

Joseph Tartakoff offers another look at the Post-Intelligencer‘s final days; while Alan Mutter observes Seattlepi.com’s instant startup as a stand-alone site.

We’ve previously noted the similarities between the Bushies’ arrogant hubris and the “create your own reality” corporate-motivation side of New Age philosophy. Now, Barbara Ehrenreich makes the even more obvious connection between this “law of attraction”/”visualization” ideology and the recent Wall Street misadventure:

“The tomes in airport bookstores’ business sections warn against ‘negativity’ and advise the reader to be at all times upbeat, optimistic, brimming with confidence. It’s a message companies relentlessly reinforced—treating their white-collar employees to manic motivational speakers and revival-like motivational events, while sending the top guys off to exotic locales to get pumped by the likes of Tony Robbins and other success gurus. Those who failed to get with the program would be subjected to personal ‘coaching’ or shown the door….”No one was psychologically prepared for hard times when they hit, because, according to the tenets of positive thinking, even to think of trouble is to bring it on.”

I’ve also noted that the Obamans’ “hope” mantra is vastly different from positive thinking’s yin-without-yang, comedy-without-tragedy worldview. Hope says the pains of life do exist, but they don’t have to persist.

…did indeed, according to the hereby-linked story, offer to take over the Post-Intelligencer, keep it going in print, and assume its ongoing losses. But Hearst wouldn’t have gotten any cash under the proposal.