…a national girlie mag created a fictional pictorial essay about a Seattle coffee shop, the “Big Cups Coffee House,” with nude baristas. Now, someone in Maine has really opened one. The owner claims to have had 150 applicants for the 10 available jobs.

…is over, and the party races are just as muddled as before. In other nooze:

• Seattle transportation planners have a desire named streetcar.
• We say goodbye today to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, TM founder, mantra seller, and guru to everyone from John Lennon to David Lynch; to Barry Morse, costar of the original The Fugitive and Space: 1999; and to Dr. Ernesto Illy, purveyor of canned espresso beans and a promoter of better coffee back when Howard Schultz was still playing college football.
• Starting this June: Nonstop flights from Sea-Tac to Beijing.
• Wall St. goes kablooey, recession’s probably already here.
• Meanwhile, the housing slump’s shut down 18 sawmills in the state.
• Issaquah bans panhandling, car washes, not cookie sales.
• Guy pretends to be a member of rock vets Queensryche, as part of a plan to steal people’s IDs.
• “Boy hit in the face with water bottle thrown from car.”
• A judge rules against BushCo, says the Navy still has to protect orcas from sonar.
• One more reason to visit my ol’ hometown: A museum full of vintage telephone gear.
• Tornados in the South kill at least 48. Could climate change be one reason for the storms’ severity?

(My apologies if that word-wraps weirdly in your browser.) As we await the potential end of at least one party race, knowing we’ve got our own state caucuses this Saturday, here’s some other nooze:

• Bush’s budget has good news for Sound Transit, bad news for education and health care.
• The Legislature’s working on relief for tenants of condo-converted apartments, just as that trend seems to be reversing.
• Oregon had gay marriages, then it didn’t. Now it’s got “domestic partnerships.”
• Georgetown: Potential haven for live theater groups displaced by gentrification elsewhere.
• Tully’s Coffee, which has turned a profit in exactly one of its 16 years, might be for sale.

…GOP presidential frontrunners as of this morning, and none of them are Fred Thompson. In other news:

• Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner may face still more delays. How smart does globally-outsourced component construction sound now?
• Raw milk— its proponents claim it’s really good for you. Except when it isn’t.
• An appeals court ordered the Belltown-based Mars Hill Graduate School (not connected with Mars Hill Church) to pay $300,000 to its first female faculty member, in a long-standing discrimination suit.
• REI’s building an eco-friendly store in Texas. Now the weekend warriors who drive 75 miles or more to their wide-open spaces can feel a little less guilty.
• A state legislator would like to ban plastic grocery bags. Yeah, but then how will our children learn the pleasures of self-asphyxiation?
• There was a cable TV outage in Kent Tuesday, due to pranksters shooting at utility lines.
• Richard McIver’s charges were dropped, one day before his domestic-abuse trial was to have started.
• Tully’s Coffee underwent another executive purge. Make your own “grounds for concern” joke here.

…of indie espresso stands, drive-thru division, gets a little colder (this time of year, at least) as baristas don lingerie and retro-burlesque attire. This is apparently a suburban-only phenomenon, at least so far. I won’t pass judgment on them vis-a-vis “empowerment” issues. But I will note that (1) the gimmick goes back at least to the thonged hot-dog vendors of Miami (if not to the serving wenches of old English country inns), and (2) back in the ’90s, a porno mag created a fictional pictorial about nude baristas at a supposed Seattle “Big Cups Coffeehouse.”

…in its incessant search for trends to parse, has suddenly discovered “The Starbucks Aesthetic.” As you assuredly already know, it’s onr of comfort, reassurance, self-congratulation, and smug pseudo-hipness.

• “The curse,” reversed?
• Could Stephen Colbert be right about America’s biggest threat being bears?
• It’s official: Even Marshall Field’s in Chicago is getting Macyfied, alas.
• The mainstream media have discovered that Starbucks is a “lifestyle brand” even more than it’s a restaurant chain. Duh. I could’ve told you that, and have. From the pre-Howard Schultz start, Starbucks’ original founders intended to rebrand European-style coffee as an essential acoutrement to a young-professional, neo-bourgeois lifestyle. They offed the image of coffeehouses full of bongo-playing beatniks, and invented the image of a home espresso machine next to every Cuisinart.
• My recent acquaintance David Goldstein has a nice essay pondering out loud about whether we can use the “F” word (no, not the boring ol’ “F” word but another, more incindiary one) to describe the current U.S. political machine.My take: This word has been so overused in political discourse, especially in online discussion boards, that it’s become nearly worthless as a descriptor. Besides, its use can easily confuse readers/listeners. We’re not (or at least I’m not, and I believe Goldstein’s not) talking about some wholesale adoption of all the cultural, verbal, and sociological shticks of 1933 Germany—or even those of 1920 Italy, which our current regime more closely resembles.

  A Texas two-step is not a goose-step.

  America’s devolution from democracy to empire has occurred in an all-American way. It’s rooted in the dark side of our own traditions. And it’s within the good side of our own traditions that its effective responses must be found.

• Last week, I was interviewed by a white hip-hop DJ from the Seattle U student Internet radio station. He was eager for stories about gangbangin’ violence in Belltown. I tried to explain to him that the noise and the rowdiness and the drunken brawling seen on First Avenue in the weekend wee hours are principally the work of young affluent Caucasians, who often arrive here en masse on chartered buses from the Eastside.I could have digressed, but didn’t, that the whole gangsta mythology was a stereotype invented a decade ago by LA record producers, specifically to nakedly exploit young affluent Caucasians’ images of young black males as sexy savages.

  In real life, violent criminals of any race tend not to be alluringly handsome, well-spoken, or well-dressed. They’re far more likely to be pathetic, desperate losers, out of touch with their own souls.

First, Starbucks bought up Seattle’s Best Coffee, and promptly shuttered many SBC stores near existing Starbucks outlets. Now, it’s completely shuttering SBC’s subsidiary chain Torrefazione Italia, known for serving robust coffee drinks in old-world style ceramic cups. Let’s hope new indie operators can take over at least a few of Torrefazione’s locations.

The labor organizers who couldn’t get into Wal-Mart just might have a new goal. New York magazine, in a story largely ignored here even by the “alternative” media, reports about one guy’s attempt to bring union representation to a Manhattan Starbucks outlet. Among the grievances he and his coworkers cite: mandatory perkiness. The union organization they’re trying to bring in: None other than that ol’ nemesis of the Northwest timber barons, the Industrial Workers of the World.

…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.

…but find bemusing, part 4,332: A weblog devoted exclusively to “Starbucks Gossip.”

AS THE GANG at Anthropologie take down the Xmas window displays, we mark the end of a damn-depressin’ year, both here at MISC Towers and out in the world at large.

But there have been some not-altogether-unpleasant events during it, particularly this past week or so.

On Christmas Eve Eve, the Wall of Sound folk put up a holiday fete starring the improvised vocal stylings of Les Voix Vulgaires (from left, King Leah, Detonator Beth Lawrence, and Amy Denio).

Then this past Tuesday, K Records held an intimate li’l CD release party at the Green Room bar in the Showbox building. It promoted reissue compilations by two early-’80s local “art-damage” bands, the Beakers and the Blackouts.

Ex-Beaker (and fellow Stranger refugee) Jim Anderson is shown above, introducing longtime local musician/producer Steve Fisk, who performed for the packed room on a vintage ARP synthesizer. Also in attendance: Ex-Blackout Bill Rieflin and ex-Beaker Francesca Sundsten, who’ve been a lovey-dovey couple for perhaps more years than they care to remember.

I have more memories of the Blackouts than of the Beakers (I saw more of the formers’ gigs, including several at the Showbox). In Loser, I marked the birth date of the “Seattle scene” as the date, in 1976, of the premier gig by the Blackouts’ previous incarnation, the Telepaths. The Beakers, meanwhile, were among the earliest incarnations of the Olympia scene’s indie-ideology purity shtick.

In the blurry mists of hindsight, both bands now seem to belong outside of their time and place. The bands they borrowed from (Pere Ubu, Gang of Four, the Pop Group) didn’t become VH1 nostalgia faves. Their sounds remain as brittly dissonant, yet strongly compelling, as ever.

But some retail institutions did not survive the holiday season. One was the second incarnation of Video Vertigo, East Pike Street’s own friendly neighborhood horror-and-porn video store.

Another was the Sam Goody music store at Third and Pine. It’s been there, under one chain-name or another, since the late ’70s. The building owners now want to carve the space into several smaller retail spots, possibly including (you guessed it) a Starbucks.

AND SO IT HAS COME TO THIS: Frasier ends tonight, after eleven seasons and 264 episodes, of which only one had been half filmed in Seattle. That’s never stopped the local media from considering the series to be “ours;” a portryal, to varying degrees of accuracy, of the local urban zeitgeist.

I must, at least partly, agree with the assessment.

While written and executed on the Paramount lot in LA (one of the early writers, Ken Levine, did spend a little time around here as a Mariners announcer), the show did express what the culture-analysts call a “sense of place.” It was a place that only barely existed in real life, alongside several other Seattles, except in the highly selective realities of the early Seattle Weekly and KUOW.

In 1993, Nirvana’s final album was about to come out. Microsoft Windows was still a kludgy interface add-on to MS-DOS. Seattle was still mostly Boeing Country. Our wealthy were fewer, and much less ostentatious. The upscale home of choice was a huge waterfront “cabin,” not a condo.

But over the next seven years, it came to be. All the “market price” restaurants. All the frou-frou supper clubs. All the high-rise townhomes. All the gourmet cheese shops. All the mauve men’s shirts. All the uptight attitudes.

Now, the Frasier universe goes into that great rerun in the sky. What will be the next great fictional Seattle?

Let’s not wait for Hollywood to invent it. Let’s make it ourselves.

PHOTO PHRIDAY TODAY begins with some standard beautiful cityscapes.

I’ll miss University Used and Rare Books, closing after 40 years. It was your classic college-town used-book store, complete with tall shelves, cats, grizzled customers, and that amazing out-of-print cult classic you’d never seen before.

SOME PSEUDONYMOUS GENT has drawn up and annotated “A Californian’s Conception of the Continental United States.” State #5 (of only 14 total): “This is the state of Seattle unless you’re really wealthy, in which case it’s the state of Puget Sound. This is where Starbucks comes from. You’ll note that both Oregon and Seattle span the space between the west coastline and the I-5 corridor.”