…but yr. web-editor just might (repeat, might) have had either a panic attack or a “silent” heart attack late Monday night.

It was at the long-belated end of an extremely long and extremely stressful day, in which I’d found myself gasping for breath to the point of giggling. By the time I finally got home around 11:30, I felt intense pain in my lower abdomen and left shoulder (but not further down either arm). I tried to relax enough to sleep, but only kept getting more tense. At the episode’s nadir, I had to fight to breathe and felt searing pain when I did.

But then I finally did relax enough to sleep, which I did until 2 p.m. Tuesday. Since then, I’ve continued to maintain my regular activities (applying for jobs, writing, schmoozing, shopping). But some shoulder pain has remained, and intense headaches have come and gone.

At no point in any of this has my heartbeat felt too slow, too fast, or erratic.

I still don’t know what happenned. I might not until sometime next week. But for now, I’m trying to take things easy. So I might not see y’all at Bumbershoot ’03. But please rest assured I’m alive and more-or-less well now.

SO AT THE AGE OF approximately 46 and a half, I’ve finally had an intimation of mortality. Until this week, I’d been holding onto the pseudo-invulnerability of youth all this time. Long-term friends have gone bald, had kids, undergone nasty divorces, won Emmys or Pulitzers, or moved to Germany. A few have passed on, due to everything from suicide and drugs to cancer and HIV. Others have valiantly fought back in the face of doom and become stronger, wiser people.

I never wanted to become middle aged. I’d always associated it with those annoying guys whose lives had essentially ended at the end of The Sixties, and who ever since wouldn’t stop alleging that Their Generation was some sort of superior species. I’d planned to stay sprightly and open to new ideas. Either that or become an unabashed crochety old geezer. (My short-lived Tablet column was even titled Back In My Day, Sonny.)

Nowadays, there are at least some role models out there for ’80s-generation fellas growing older, if not gracefully, at least forcefully. Elvis Costello, and to a lesser extent Joe Jackson, are making some of the most provocative music of their careers. Locally, so are Kim Warnick (in Visqueen) and Scott McCaughey (in the Minus Five). Peter Bagge’s comics and Charles Peterson’s photographs keep getting better.

This time has not come for me to, as Charles Aznavour sang, “pay for yesterday when I was young.” It is time for me to start seriously considering what I wanna really, really do with what I fully expect to be the many, many more years I’ve got.

…to the memory of Cynthia Doyon, host and creative genius behind KUOW’s The Swing Years And Then Some. She’d been at the UW’s other station at the time, KCMU (now KEXP), a couple of years before I was. She moved on to the UW’s “pro” station, KUOW, in 1979, just as public radio was really taking off as a national institution. Her Saturday-night show became a local institution for 24 years, honoring a 30-year era of music that created much of American pop culture’s most timeless classics. She deftly programmed a show that was neither rigidly “historical” (just about anything from the 78-rpm era could find its way into the show) nor timidly nostalgic (she took care, in her selections and her introductions, to make the music come alive for contemporary listeners).

But Doyon was only employed part-time at KUOW, and couldn’t find enough outside work to pay the bills. Apparently despondent over her personal finances during the Great Depression II, she allegedly shot herself on the UW campus, on what Billie Holiday once referred to as a “Gloomy Monday.”

FINISHING OUR RECAP of scenes documented but not uploaded back in June, here at last is the open house at Seattle Opera’s new McCaw Hall. (Yep, a giant theater named for a family fortune earned from every theater manager’s #1 bane, cell phones.)

The joint’s not paid for yet, even though its makers saved a few bucks by keeping the structural frame of the old Civic Auditorium/Opera House. And there’s no way of telling when or how it’ll be paid for, since there aren’t any governments in the immediate proximity that have a bunch o’ spare cash laying around.

There are still two arts-related construction megaprojects in Seattle, the new downtown library and the Paul Allen-supported sculpture garden near Pier 70. It’s now time (or rather way past time) to turn our collective fiscal attention toward arts funding that emphasizes art and artists, rather than the more politically expedient route of huge building projects.

The place itself is, as you might have expected all along, a clean, retro-modern looking joint, but with its own touches. The Seattle Symphony’s Benaroya Hall looks like a modern urban Protestant church. McCaw looks like a new suburban mega-church.

In place of the old Opera House’s steak-house crimson wallpaper, McCaw’s all done up in what Ikea would consider to be “warm” designer colors. It’s all so laid back and mellow and formally informal. I’m not sure that’s the proper milieu for opera and ballet, which are (or ought to be) all about big passions. At least they kept all the public art from the old space, including the Mark Tobey mural.

…to New Kids on the Block action figures, here’s a site with dozens of your fave ’80s commercials.

…got a lot of local alt-media hype this year, depicting it as a free-wheelin’, politically-savvy, homespun li’l community gathering.

Uh-uh.

This year’s installment was a little one-block street fair, less than fully bedecked with booths, serving as the excuse for the three blocks of fenced-off, paid-admission music stages and beer gardens.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Block Party ’03 served that traditional Northwestern compulsion–the striving to spend as much time in the summer outdoors as possible, even whilst doing traditionally indoor things such as drinking and listening to rock bands. Many of the bands, such as longtime local faves Maktub (pictured below) put on stupendous sets. Others, such as the D.O.A. reunion, seemed a bit off-putting. (When, exactly, did anti-sentimentalistic hard punk become nostalgia music?)

In any event, there was always the people-watchin’, which the Block Party offered much of, in all the individualistic spectacles that are Capitol Hill hipsters.

THE JAPANESE have long been known for sex-fetishes some westerners might consider odd. Some of the odder ones are listed on this page selling import DVDs. (Link not safe for work.)

The list of videos starts out with easy to understand fantasies: Nude swimming, nude volleyball, nude gymnastics; all portrayed by casts of dozens. From there it gets into less common fantasies, such as couples having sex while the woman’s supposed roommate is supposedly asleep in the same room. Then comes a reference to something called “64 Girls Practice Emergency and First Aid.”

But halfway down the page, there’s a disc called Stark Naked Orchestra.

That’s right: Seventeen female musicians and a female conductor, all wearing only identical tasteful black pumps, sitting or standing up straight, apparently actually performing. Just like the cable pay-per-view show Naked News, this video (which I haven’t viewed) apparently depicts smart, competent women who are nude-but-not-lewd, an ultimate fantasy indeed for certain men living in the age of “women’s empowerment.” (U.S. hoaxster Alan Abel promoted an act called the Topless String Quartet circa 1971, but those women apparently didn’t really play their instruments on stage.)

(Those who insist upon thinking crudely might note that the Stark Naked Orchestra women play only horns, reeds, and percussion instruments, and might ponder whether they sometimes appear with strings.)

R.I.P. BARRY WHITE, who 30 years ago proved how sexy big guys can be.

Posting from a Net-cafe again today. My re-un-fixed laptop went back to the shop (actually to some central repair facility in Houston) today.

FUN QUOTE #1 (Snoop Doggy Dogg in the SeaTimes on women who’ve complained about his fully-clothed MC jobs on Girls Gone Wild videos–specifically, women who’ve complained about the lack of Af-Am breast-barers in the videos): “They’ve been complaining to me like crazy… They think I like the white girls because I’m on there with them, and I don’t, I just did that for money.”

FUN QUOTE #2 (Vendetta Red singer Zach Davidson in the same SeaTimes issue, on having become the client of an LA-based voice teacher): “He’s very good at that, how to preserve your voice. … When your voice goes, it’s like losing your penis.”

NEAL POLLACK sez it’s way past time Americans started fighting for their right to party:

“These are tense times. People want to loosen the steam valve a little bit. They want to participate in culture outside of the jurisdiction of federal ‘morality’ educators. We don’t want the government telling us how to spend our free time, sussing out and prosecuting casual drug users and harassing nightclub owners. And for heaven’s sake, give the kids some condoms.

“Sex and drugs and live music make life great. These are the kinds of things that were outlawed in Taliban-run Afghanistan. If they can’t be legal and easy in America, then I don’t want to live here anymore. I want to live in a place where drugs and sex are tolerated, where the government provides a sane level of social services, where religion isn’t always threatening to take over the state.”

I heartily concur.

Down with the Republican sex police AND the Democrat music censors!

Proponents of pot legalization should give up their pious guises, admit they’re really out to legalize recreational toking, and take pride in that.

We should allow and even endorse such wholesome frolics as the Fremont Parade nudists. Even set aside a clothing-optional public beach or two.

The Seattle City Council shouldn’t just approve bigger parking lots for strip clubs, it should dump its decade-long moratorium against licensing any new strip clubs.

Let’s fess up and admit our teens (and adults) are gonna be gettin’ it on w/one another, and prepare ’em for the potential physical (and psychological) consequences.

And consentin’ adults of whatever gender oughta be able to get it on w/other consentin’ adults of whatever gender, even for material gifts, as long as they don’t keep the neighbors awake at night.

Hedonistically-related activities that do impunge on the well-being of others, such as stinky meth labs that could explode and take out the whole block any day now, could still be prosecuted under those reasons.

Heck, I’d even lower the drinking age a year or two, under certain circumstances and with certain driving-related caveats.

There. Now I’ve gone and ruined any chance of ever getting elected to the U.S. Senate.

Unless a bunch of us go out and do what Pollack asks–form a “Party Party” built around the right to live our own lives our own way.

As I’ve written in the past, Seattle’s civic history has always involved the dichotomy between sober civic-building and boistrous partying-for-fun-and-profit. (Frenchie theorist Jean Baudrillard would call it “production” vs. “seduction.”) The past decade of the hi-tech boom saw great public and private investment in the “production” half of the equation, but all that remains standing from much of that are monuments to the bureaucrat-acceptable parts of the “seduction” industries–sports and recreation sites, big comfy homes, museums, and performing-arts palaces. The newest of these, McCaw Hall (the revamped Opera House), has its open house this Sunday. (Yes, it’s a theater named for a family whose fortune was made in that bane of theater operators everywhere, cell phones.)

Las Vegas is realizing the economic value of fun. It’s time our regional (and national) leaders did likewise, or got replaced with other leaders who do.

(PS: I know the cyber-Libertarians would insist to me that they fully support the right to party. Alas, some of these dudes also support the right to pollute, the right to discriminate, the right to pay shit wages, and the right to bust unions.)

(PPS: Ex-Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg discusses some of this in his new book, Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit. Goldberg makes the supposedly provocative, but actually common-sensical, point that the Demos can’t successfully court what used to be known as “the youth vote” if they’re sucking up to censors and wallowing in baby-boomer bias.)

…to the economic wreck.

You already read about the impending demise, sometime later this year or early next, of the historic and sumptuous Cloud Room in the quaint but affordable Camlin Hotel. It’s been one of Seattle’s oldest surviving piano bars, along with (but a lot more cozy n’ elegant than) the also-closing Sorry Charlie’s on lower Queen Anne.

Slightly less publicized is the folding of Orpheum Records on Broadway, one of the town’s finest indie-rock and techno CD stores. It was a great supporter of local bands for over a decade and a half, and hosted innumerable memorable in-store gigs by local and national faves.

The Capitol Hill Times recently ran a checklist-type piece about the comings and goings of the Hill’s CD stands. A partial list:

Coming: Sonic Boom, Wall of Sound (moved from Belltown), Music Werks, Down Low Music, Half Price Books and Music.

Going: Wherehouse Music, Fallout, Beats International, and now Orpheum.

Morphing: Cellophane Square into Everyday Music (the budget chain of Cellophane’s Portland-based parent company, Django).

Staying put: Fred Meyer Music Market.

MEANWHILE…: My former bosses at Fantagraphics Books have publicly pleaded for customers to buy more of its graphic albums and comics, to help the company survive the current econo-turmoil (which in this company’s case included the bankruptcy of a big wholesaler). Fantagraphics has gone thru plenty of ups n’ downs in its past 27 years, and I’m sure it will survive this setback as well. But it’s still a great opportunity for you to grab some of the best visual storytelling this and several other nations have ever produced.

…to Raymond “Ras Bongo” Lindsay, the Lake City music-store owner and longtime staple of the local roots-music circuit, who was slain in an apparent domestic dispute. I’d only met Bongo offstage once, at his store (see above), but instantly sensed him as a gentle man of a centered sensibility.

TO AVE AND AVE NOT DEPT.: Last weekend’s University District Street Fair was supposed to have been the coming-out party for the completely rebuilt University Way. But, in traditional best-laid-plans fashion, the Ave’s northernmost big block (47th to 50th) remained closed and unpaved.

Ergo, the fair was shrunk to about 70 percent of its normal size. The audience’s size, and energy level, seemed even further reduced, despite decent weather. This may have befitted a neighborhood that was already stuck in the retail doldrums even before the totally traffic-closing construction scheme made it worse.

Some UW design students had a big display in the former Tower Records storefront, full of schemes to redo the Ave’s storefronts so they’d look all fresh and Euro-modern, not the funky/rundown amalgamation of low-rise architectures we all know and love.

Still, there’s something to be said for a reinvent-the-Ave campaign that comes out of a sense of creativity, that asks young adults (rather than corporate consulting firms) what a young-adult shopping street should look like, and that imagines plenty of spaces for independent businesses instead of the same ol’ dorky chains.

JOSEPH P. KAHN TRIES TO EXPLAIN the rash of movie and product names starting with the letter “X.” No, it’s not so they’ll be listed first in reverse alphabetical order.

AS IF YOU HAVEN’T GUESSED IT, there’ve apparently been no big mass-destrux weapons caches in Iraq. Saddam really was only a threat to his own people.

THE MAJOR RECORD LABELS are rumored to be commissioning virus-type software programs that’d be posted within, or under the titles of, online music files, in order to instill fear into the hearts of MP3 traders. I’m old enough to vaguely remember when the record co.’s claimed to be rebels, or at least friendly vendors of rebellious attitudes. Today’s music monoliths might market one-dimensional celeb images of bad boys and naughty girls, but that’s no more “rebellious” than the sight of Republican politicians on Harleys.

TODAY WE BEGIN a new occasional photo series, Space Available, depicting some of the once-productive retail and office real estate currently made redundant by today’s economic collapse.

…the recently-ubiquitous “No Iraq War” posters is dead. Morgan Griffin, 66, was a retired Seattle Symphony bassoonist who’d survived several obscure illnesses and had learned to live his life to the fullest. His was a life from which we all could learn a thing or three.

…to “Value Added Marketing” and “The Fake Little Laugh That Means ‘Bad Acting,'” Phil Agre’s compiled a long, thoughtful, personal list of “Minor Annoyances and What They Teach Us.”

Nina Simone, the jazz singer-songwriter and outspoken advocate of racial justice, died Monday at age 70 at her home somewhere in France. (She’d left the US in ’73 in disgust and only came back occasionally on tour.) Her official website has her whole fascinating life story, but it doesn’t include her last local appearance at Benaroya Hall in 2000, a spectacular evening according to those I know who attended.