Last November, Capitol Hill resident Ferdous Ahmed appeared in a full page photograph in City Arts magazine. He was dressed to the proverbial nines in a vintage black suit, top hat, sunglasses, and high-top boots, accessorized with a gold pocket watch.

A lifelong vintage-wear fan and collector, Ahmed had just opened a boutique on East Olive Way the month before. It specialized in outfitting “steampunk” afficianados in suitably outlandish retro costumery, with garments and accessories mixed and matched from assorted real-world times and places (though mostly of a Victorian sensibility).

Ahmed’s boutique, Capitol Hill Vaudeville, is gone now.

The Solara Building, where the store had been, is mostly vacated (except for a tattoo studio). Entrepreneurs Shanon Thorson and Laura Olson (the team behind Po Dog on Union Street and the Grim bar on 11th Avenue), in partnership with Alex Garcia (Emerson Salon, Banyan Branch Marketing), are turning the place into The Social, a mammoth (3,000 square feet) gay bar and restaurant. Construction crews are now reshaping the building’s interior to sport a dining room and at least four semi-detached bar areas.

Olson and her partners are keeping the tattoo studio on the premises during the construction period, and say they want to bring back some of the building’s other former tenants (including a hair salon and a role-playing game store) in its peripheral spaces.

Ahmed’s boutique, though, might not get invited back. It was just getting off the ground as a business when it got sent packing. Harem, another clothing shop that had been in the Solara (and had previously been in its own storefront on Broadway), is definitely not returning; owner Victoria Landis has held her liquidation sale and is moving on.

Two features had made the Solara ideal for merchants like Landis and Ahmed.

The first was the interior flexibility of its main floor. It featured a big open space, where the gaming store could hold tournaments and the boutiques could hold fashion shows and receptions, without having to pay full time for the extra square footage.

The second was the relatively low rent. None of the Solara’s tenants had its own street-facing storefront. Without this means to attract casual foot traffic, in a building that was already set back from the street by a small parking strip, the tenants had to draw their clientele with clever promotion to identifiable niche markets. The building’s low rents were priced accordingly, to allow these specialty destination spaces to exist.

But a couple of alt-fashion boutiques and a gaming parlor just can’t bring in the kind of money a destination restaurant, and especially a bar/nightclub, can potentially generate.

Thus, the Hill is getting a new, high profile gay club. Olive Way, in particular, is getting another stop on what’s quickly shaping up as the Hill’s next major bar-crawling scene.

And we’re losing an experiment in providing urban spaces for highly specialized retail, the first experiment of its kind here since the Seattle Independent Mall (on East Pike a decade ago.)

Any “artistic” neighborhood needs some cheaper spaces within its mix. Spaces where the unexpected can happen, where new subcultures can form, where new concepts can germinate.

I was reminded of this when I read the University of Washington Press’s new essay collection Seattle Geographies. One of its longer chapters is entitled “Queering Gay Space.”

The chapter’s authors (Michael Brown, Sean Wang, and Larry Knopp) noted that Capitol Hill hadn’t always been the region’s gay culture nexus. In the first half of the last century, gay and lesbian bars, cabarets, and residential homes existed, with varying degrees of “out”-ness, mainly in Pioneer Square, plus a few scattered spots throughout the downtown core and in the University District and Queen Anne.

But when gay pride first really took off in the early 1970s, the Boeing Bust had depressed housing prices throughout the region. The Hill’s housing prices were further held back by what the essay’s authors called “white flight and fears of inner-city decay.” That gave the Hill a “large number of affordable apartments and rooms in shared houses,” which “drew young queer baby boomers into the area.”

The Hill’s desirability as a place to live, aided in part by then-low housing costs, helped spur its growth as a place for gay businesses and hangouts; and also as a place for bohemian art, theater, and fashion scenes.

Thus, four decades later, it can sprout a venture as monumental as The Social.

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

Lots of media outlets, even the BBC, did the whole Obama/Osama confusion thang last week.

All you people out there who love to boast at the tops of your voices about not having owned a TV in ___ years: You’re not nearly as “special” as you think you are.

An edited, improved version of my snarky li’l manifesto piece from earlier this month became my first contribution to Crosscut.com. That’s the local punditry site founded by original Seattle Weekly publisher David Brewster.

It was up for just a few hours when all of Crosscut went down, a victim of last week’s Amazon “cloud computing services” crash.

But it’s up now. And it’s got a lively comment thread.

Some time within the next few days, something by me should be up at Crosscut.com. As you may recall, that’s the nonprofit local news n’ punditry site started by original Seattle Weekly publisher David Brewster. I’ll let you know when.

Mayor Mike McGinn is one of the civic leaders who’ve submitted short essays to Dan Bertolet’s new CityTank.org, on the topic of celebrating urban life.

McGinn’s piece is a photo essay (merely excerpted below) that reads like a manifesto:

Sarah Palin and other figures on the right like to talk about “small town values” as being “the real America.” We know better. These are our values:

• We have great urban places, where people can live and shop in the same building. And we protect them.
• Seattleites create and use urban spaces – their way. From the bottom up.
• We take care of each other – and we feed each other.
• We’re not scared of new ideas.
• We think idealism is a virtue.
• We play like it matters, because it does.
• We stand up for each other.
• We share our cultures with each other. And the music, the art, the food…is astounding.
• We love race and social justice.
• We expect our youth to achieve.

President Barack Obama called on America to win the future. Mr. President, the people of Seattle are ready.

Since I believe one good manifesto deserves another, I hereby offer my own:

David Guterson and other figures on Bainbridge Island like to talk about the countryside as being the only real place to live. We know better. These are our values:

• We value diverse workplaces and gatherings. Upscale white men alongside upscale white women—and even upscale white gays.
• Yet we also admire African Americans; preferably if they are both musical and dead.
• We champion the institution of public education, as long as our own kids can get into a private school.
• We celebrate people’s expressions of sexuality, provided they’re not too, you know, sexual.
• We strive toward progressive, inclusive laws and policies except when they would inconvenience business.
• We take pride in our urban identity, as we build more huge edifices and monuments to desperately prove how world class we are.
• We support the arts, particularly when that support doesn’t stick us in the same room with unkempt artists.
• We value regional planning and cooperation, even with those mouth-breathing hicks out there.
• We protect and enhance the environment, particularly those environments we drive 40 miles or more to hike in.
• We love a strong, vital music scene that’s in someone else’s neighborhood.
• We appreciate our heritage. We moan about how everything in this town sucks; then, years later, we claim it was great back then but all sucks now.
• We value a strong, independent news media, regularly alerting us to the city’s 103 Best Podiatrists.
• We admire innovation and original ideas, especially if they’re just like something from New York or San Francisco.
• We support locally-based businesses until they get too big.

President Barack Obama has advocated “the fierce urgency of now.” Mr. President, the people of Seattle will get around to it once they’ve finished playing Halo: Reach.

Joseph Stiglitz, writing in Vanity Fair, is hardly the only commentator to notice how modern America’s grossly disproportionate concentration of wealth by the richest 1 percent is bad for the nation, and the world, as a whole.

Stiglitz’s addition to this argument is his observation that the richest’s pigginess isn’t good for the richest either. America’s (and the “industrialized” world’s) prosperity is a direct result of publicly-funded infrastructure, from roads and shipping lanes to the now embattled “social safety net.”

Then there’s the simple matter of having a middle class with enough disposable wealth to buy the stuff the rich people’s companies sell.

If all those are in tatters, Stiglitz asserts, the basis of the richest’s own prosperity is endangered.

His solution, like a lot of “solutions” offered in essays such as this, is vague. But it’s centered on the need to finally pay attention to the needs of the less than filthy rich.

In other words, those who aren’t the targets of Vanity Fair’s advertisers.

Stiglitz and his editors at VF have achieved an impressive rhetorical feat.

They’ve framed an anti-elitist argument in a manner compatible with the mission of an elitist publication.

It’s not the first time this has happened, however.

A few years back, a freelance writer whose name I unfortunately forget told of submitting a story proposal about hunger in America to the NY Times Sunday magazine. Its editors wrote back to him asking him to make it “more upscale.”

A lot of our allegedly “liberal” media institutions are so exclusively aimed at “the target demographic” (i.e., the upper-upper middle class and above), they have nothing to say to, or about, today’s epidemic of downward mobility.

That’s even the case of so-called “alternative” media outlets. If you’re not likely to hang out in hip bars or wear the coolest new styles or consume either gourmet burgers or wheat-germ smoothies, they’d rather not have you mussing up their audience metrics.

The building of a true populist socio-political movement will have to address all this (and, of course, much more).

At 2 a.m. this morning, I finished a book project that won’t earn me a cent for at least six months. I can now resume finding other excuses not to blog.

After I post a few entries I’d been putting off.

First, you might have heard of the big online buzz over what is supposed to be the only nude photo ever posed by Elizabeth Taylor.

It’s a photoshopped fake.

The original “body shot,” to which Taylor’s face was pasted on, is a “tasteful” Hollywood glamour nude, done in 1940 by photographer Peter Gowland and included in a photography guidebook he and his wife issued many years later.

The figure pictured in it doesn’t even remotely match the see-thru shots Taylor had made for Playboy on the set of Cleopatra. Those were published in 1963, less than five years after she was supposed to have posed for the nude. (The Playboy image does not appear to be online in any freely accessible place; here’s a tiny thumbnail of a similar shot.)

Radiohead.

For more than a decade, they’ve been a band on the cutting edge of music, or at least of music marketing.

So what do they do to give their new CD/LP/download product the splashy promotion they believe it deserves?

They come out with that most modern of media products.

A newspaper.

Specifically, a 12-page tabloid, handed out for free in select major cities, including this one. Online reports say copies went fast in many of these pass-out spots. (Last I heard, you could get one at Sonic Boom Records in Ballard, but only while supplies last.)

This sign of newsprint’s continued attention-grabbing viability comes two years and two weeks after the last print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Yes, I still mourn it.

I even dream about it. But I won’t get into that.

I will say I still believe there’s a P-I sized hole in the local media landscape. PubliCola, Seattle PostGlobe, Crosscut, and now SportsPress Northwest only fill pieces of that hole.

The SeattlePI.com website not only doesn’t fill its former parent journal’s role, it doesn’t even fill the role it could fill, as the go-to online local headline source.

It’s still designed like a newspaper’s web presence. The front page, and the second-tier directory pages, are each cluttered with 100 or more links, mostly to syndicated and wire pieces and to the contributions of unpaid bloggers. There’s no direct way to find the site’s own staff-written material (which remains remarkably good).

What’s worse, PI.com, as it’s currently structured, has little growth potential. It’s already generating as many “hits” as it did when it had a whole newspaper to give it content. It’s either just breaking even or is perpetually about to, according to which rumors you care to believe. There’s not much further revenue it can attract as a website with banner ads.

PI.com needs to find its next level.

With its current minimal staff, it likely couldn’t create a web app or a mobile app that could command a price from readers, a la Rupert Murdoch’s iPad “paper” The Daily or the newly paywalled NY Times site.

But it could repackage its current in-house content, plus the best of its bloggers’ contributions, into a free web app and/or mobile app.

This would make PI.com’s articles and essays better organized, easier to navigate and to read.

This would also offer advertisers with bigger, more productive ad spaces that would compliment, not clutter up, the reading experience.

Then of course, there’s always the possibility of moving the P-I back into print. Perhaps as a colorful freebie tabloid, one that could siphon off home and car ads from the SeaTimes and lifestyle ads from the slick regional monthlies.

Alternately, some of the local philanthropists who’d offered to take over the P-I from Hearst in 2009 could start their own paper, creating a new tradition.

While I was watching the Super Bowl (hooray non-Steelers!) and watching Glee for the very first time (it’s like the Disney Channel’s High School Musical movies, only with less sincerity or realism), big news came down in the online realm.

Arianna Huffington and her investors announced they’re selling HuffingtonPost.com to AOL.

Ms. Huffington herself will stay on board, running both HuffPost and AOL’s existing content sites. These include Engadget, TechCrunch, Politics Daily, PopEater, Moviefone, MapQuest, Autoblog, FanHouse, StyleList, and Black Voices. (Taken as a whole, AOL’s current sites already employ more journalists and editors than any other online-only media concern.)

Since many tech-biz observers seem to believe that everything AOL touches turns to dross, there are worthy worries about the fate of everybody’s favorite liberal punditry and “celebrity skin” aggregation site.

Will AOL do for HuffPo what it did for (or rather, to) Time Warner?

Will HuffPo’s daring advocacy and insatiable curiosity for new trends become subsumed under AOL’s management driven policy (known within the company as “the AOL Way”), which determines what gets written about on its sites on a complex formula designed to drive productivity and search engine hits?

One thing’s for sure—the deal’s official price tag. It’s $315 million.

How much was Newsweek sold for? Apparently not a whole helluva lot.

How much was BusinessWeek sold for? Not a whole helluva lot more.

UPDATE: Here’s one of those tech-biz observers who thinks it’s a potentially lousy deal, but one both sides needed to make.

After months in the making, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has finally issued forth its paid-subscription based (albeit free for the first two weeks) online “newspaper,” christened The Daily. It’s only available via an iPad app, though I suspect versions for other platforms will roll out in time.

First complaint: I am a veteran of, and remain loyal to, the Daily of the University of Washington. To me, no other enterprise will ever deserve the name “The Daily.”

Second complaint: After all this planning by one of the world’s biggest media companies, the thing’s a flimsy mess.

It feels like an awkward mix of USA Today and the New York Daily News (archrival to Murdoch’s own New York Post). It’s full of stunning color wire-service photos, but its news stories are short and superficial; many are rehashes of stuff an online news geek would have already read.

Mitigating factors: It’s not as rabidly stupid as Murdoch’s Fixed Noise Channel, nor as puerile (or as fun) as his NY Post. The opinion section has a few intriguing, and eminently readable, guest essays. There’s no overt political agenda.

But overall, it’s an over-processed, over-formatted, over-packaged hunk of commercial middle-of-the-road blandness, being sent out into an online America that seems to not like that sort of thing.

While I wasn’t looking, Amazon’s put its Kindle ebook machine in brick n’ mortar stores. Including Fred Meyer, whose own in-store book selection has seldom stretched beyond the mega-bestsellers and Harlequin romances.

• Ida Kay Greathouse, who ran or co-ran the Frye Art Museum for more than four decades, died at the impressive age of 105. With her husband Walser (executor of meat packer Charles Frye’s estate), then on her own after Walser’s death in 1966, Greathouse kept the Frye free, and kept its laser focus on “realist” art. She paved the way for later curators’ expansion of the museum’s mission into more contemporary genres.
• The 619 Western art studio building lives! Probably. State transportation planners, who still want to dig the Alaskan Way Viaduct’s replacement tunnel beneath 619’s less than totally solid foundations, said they’ll now try to work out a plan to shore up the building without upscaling it out of the artists’ price range. We shall see.
• The Red Dress concert special, a Seattle Channel/KCTS presentation that aired this past week, can still be viewed online at Seattlechannel.org. The show highlights a rock/punk/blues/funk fusion outfit that’s still as vital as it was three decades ago. Who’d like to scour for donations, so’s we can have more showcase concerts like this on local public TV?
• The Neptune Theater in the U District closes this weekend as a cinema, to reopen later on as a live performance space. I remember the Neptune’s heyday in the ’80s as a “repertory cinema,” showing a different new or classic bill every night. There was a suggestion book at the concession counter. I used to write in silly double bill ideas like M and Z. If the book were still there, I’d now be suggesting a twin bill of 127 Hours and A Farewell to Arms.

I can imagine the next stage in this saga.

Get ready for “The Legally Prohibited From Being Defiantly Truthful on Television Tour.”

The Belltown Messenger, the scrappy li’l neighborhood monthly for which I wrote and edited for some six years, has just put out its last, online only, edition.

Publisher Alex R. Mayer, who’s now running a pro-pot rag called Mary Jane, had kept the Messenger going on the interwebs after the last, newsletter-sized, print Messenger came out last August. (I was not a part of the latter, unprinted, incarnation.)

The Messenger’s spiritual roots go back to the late 1980s and Belltown’s Brain Fever Dispatch, published by Elaine Bonow out of her dance studio.

At the time, there were a few scattered condo towers going up, but the ol’ Regrade was still largely a half square mile of print shops, small apartments, car lots, and artists’ studios. It was the latter milieu, that of the painters and musicians and clothing designers in their rustic lo-rent spaces, the original Dispatch covered.

The Messenger’s era of Belltown also contained art and music and fashion, plus a lot of creative “foodie” restaurants.

And it had a lot of other things.

It had the region’s hottest “HI-NRG” bar scene, which was covered more completely in Exotic Underground and later in D List.

It had the high-rise rich (and the merely affluent, spending as if they were rich). The regional slick magazines catered to these consumers’ spending needs much more closely.

And it continued to have more than its share of the various “street” subcultures, chronicled and advocated for in Real Change.

What Belltown didn’t have were some of the things “neighborhood” papers spend a lot of time covering, such as public schools, parks, kids, and community centers.

In the end, the “place” covered in the Messenger wasn’t so much a geographic region as a state of mind.

Any attempt to bring back something like it, which I’m considering, would have to keep that in mind.