With a high “five” from John Curley to the big ‘KING Mike’ balloon/float, the downtown holiday shopping season is among us.

I know I’m not the only one who saw something subliminally S/M-like about the real woman locked up inside a giant snow globe.

Then, at the Black Friday parade’s conclusion, always comes the fake snow shot out from TSFKATBM (that’s “the store formerly known as The Bon Marche”).

The passing parade witnesses the demolition of the former Frederick Cadillac showroom, used more recently as the Teatro ZinZanni dinner theater, for a mega-high-rise condo project…

…and the arrival of what’s officially called the Seattle Streetcar, but is already unofficially known as the South Lake Union Trolley (for the acronymic possibilities), on a test run up Westlake Avenue. Passenger service is still tentatively scheduled to commence some time in December.

Drew Carey was at the George & Dragon pub in Fremont on Monday afternoon.

During a typically packed UK soccer day (there was a satellite TV match showing between Arsenal and Reading), Carey showed up in a chauffeured minivan with a small entourage. He plugged his recent status as a goodwill ambassador for U.S. pro soccer (you know, that game where nothing’s made up and the points do matter). Specifically, Paul Allen and partners have recruited Carey as a minority investor in their Major League Soccer expansion team, to launch at Qwest Field in 2009. (Rumor has it that somebody else sought the franchise, but they bid over the actual retail price.)

Carey’s big promo point during the speech (which he repeated that night as a Monday Night Football booth guest): The team will offer “club memberships.” For a projected $100/year, hardcore fans will (1) get an exclusive package of merch, and (2) get to vote every few years or so about the team’s future, even getting to fire the general manager.

He also got in a well-received dig about how such a fan-empowerment schtick might have helped with “that basketball team you used to have.”

Here are some beautiful, haunting photos of toy factories in China. The series oscillates between three extremes: The official “fun” expressed in the products themselves, the regimented factory atmosphere, and the close-up portraits of individual humans (mostly female) on the production lines.

Turns out I’m not the only one who’s become fascinated by old blank signs.

…autumn unofficially arrived last night, in the form of a spectacular thunderstorm.

This morning, the skies over Seattle have returned to their diffuse, impressionistic low-light pattern. It’s refreshing, it’s cool, it’s beautiful. Really.

I first visited the Pike Place Market in 1975. More than three years after city residents voted to “Save the Market,” the big renovation/restoration was still underway. Much of the South Arcade was boarded up, with “artistic” grafitti and murals painted on the plywood barriers. One board bore the simple message: DON’T FIX IT UP TOO MUCH–SAVE THE MARKET.

The Market voters had “saved” was a homey, funky, rundown warren of stands and shops, a place of proletarian dreams and honest hard work. The fixed-up Market maintained this look, even as the surrounding First Avenue sleaze district shrank.

As the years passed, it became a mecca for civic self-congratulation. More merchants geared themselves to tourists, using such gimmicks as the infamous fish throwers. Luxury car dealerships shot magazine ads along Pike Place (“No Ordinary Supermarket, No Ordinary Car”).

New York financiers, supposedly “silent” investors in the Market’s real estate, suddenly claimed ownership. The city fought ’em and won. The city argued the financiers intended to “fix it up too much,” destroying the Market’s soul for the sake of upscale retail revenues.
Now, it seems the city bureaucrats running the Market might just be “fixing it up too much” on their own. Some of the powers-that-be want to promote the place as the ultimate high-end retail destination for the condo crowd.

I say the Market’s role as “the soul of Seattle” is more vital than competing against Whole Foods.

Sure, sell fancy stuff. But still sell the basics. Make the place a refuge for products downtown people need but high-end retail doesn’t offer.

And Keep It Funky, God.

…Seafair parade, here’s an official Seafair Pirates eye patch. It’s sponsored by AT&T Wireless, made of space-age rubberized plastic, and made in China.

…we must offer one last bourbon-and-soda for lounge pianist Howard Bulson.

Here are the sights of the Seattle Art Museum (version 3.0) all-nighter, full of Cinco de Mayo drunks, patrons, ravers, kids, and aesthetes alike.

When SAM 2.0 first opened downtown in 1991, the Robert Venturi-designed structure was a tribute to PoMo monumentalism. So what if it didn’t work as a public space or as an exhibition site. It was by a world-class architect, and little else mattered.

A decade later, Washington Mutual decided it wanted an office tower on the former Rhodes of Seattle department-store site, adjacent to and owned by SAM. The museum and the bank arrange for a bigger SAM as part of the project.

This time, they went to Portland and Seattle architects and designers. The new design befits Seattle’s legacy as a City of Engineers (and the status of director Mimi Gardner Gates, seen above, as Microsoft Bill’s stepmom). The new space is a lot less flashy and showy than the old space. It’s functional and organized. It’s built to exacting standards of crowd flow, presentation, and preservation. (The big exterior windows can be darkened in exacting degrees, to provide natural light without fading the paintings.)

The new space almost doubles SAM downtown’s exhibition space. Additional floors, which have been built for SAM but leased back to WaMu for now, could almost double it further.

The extra room allows for more art in more different, spacier, settings. Of particular note is the big, prominent area for modern and contemporary art, which helps make the whole place more current and more relevant to the hipoisie.

(Now, if they could address the common local-art-scene perception that SAM (heart)s Seattle collectors but cares less toward living Seattle artists.)

During the fund drive for the new SAM downtown and the Olympic Sculpture Park, SAM’s become Seattle’s wealthiest cultural institution. This time, they’ve spent this largesse wisely.

…this is the week when a major Seattle aesthetic institution marks a new opening, in a much larger, fancier space.

I speak, of course, of the Queen Anne QFC.

This 45,000-square-foot palace of sensual pleasure is twice the size of the chain’s prior unit six blocks west (a site acquired in 1974 from the once-mighty A&P). The new gallery of edibles is at the ground floor of a behemoth condo development, on land vacated by another once-mighty retailer, Tower Records.

The “store,” if you must call it that, contains all the departments you’d expect and more–a fish market, deli, “bistro,” sandwich bar, walk-in wine cooler, walk-in flower cooler, pharmacy, and, natch, a Starbucks stand.

As for product selection, it includes almost all the sometimes obscure brands I sought. It’s got HP and Pickapeppa steak sauces, Fisher scone mix, Session Lager, Hungry-Man frozen dinners, Millstone coffee, whole-wheat spaghetti, and liquid smoke. It didn’t have Moxie pop, but a manager promised it would show up next week. As for two other products it lacks, Campbell’s pepper pot soup and Arizona diet green tea, the folks in charge said they’d look into getting ’em.

This ongoing tribute to the wonders of human taste is open 24 hours a day, with no admission charge (though it’s hoped you’ll purchase some merchandise while you’re there).

As for that other local aesthetic institution opening an expanded space, the Seattle Art Museum’s grand new digs at First and Union are open free for a 35-hour marathon today and Sunday, for art lovers and Cinco de Mayo amateur drunks alike.

…are gonna love Stephen Cysewski’s new collection of mostly old street-scene photos, “Wandering in Seattle.”

Some time last year, I had a discussion with a Pacific Publishing bigwig, over whether Capitol Hill is or isn’t a real “neighborhood” or was just a jumble of subcultures and “tribes” sharing the same patch of real estate.

This New Year’s Eve I was at a potluck party on the Hill. At events like this, Capitol Hill IS a neighborhood. Painters and schoolteachers and real estate agents and former City Peoples Mercantile clerks and musicians and small business owners and Microsofties and families and singles and gays and assorted races and generations, all coming together. Some no longer live on the Hill, but still identify with it. At occasions like this dinner party, the Hill really is a neighborhood.

Perhaps no one at the event was ever next-door neighbors to anyone else at the event. But they’re still a community.

Capitol Hill is a real community. It’s also a “virtual” community, a state of mind.

Until this past Nov. 7, many people in both the physical and virtual Capitol Hills thought of these places as backwaters, sites of exile from the rampant corporate conservatism that seemed to be overtaking the rest of the nation. In this mindset, the Hill was a retreat, a preserve where the old values of progress and free thought could be kept barely alive.

But the popular repudiation of the far right in the national midterm elections shows the country moving in a new direction, a new mindset. A mindset that values self-expression, inclusion, and real caring about people. A mindset closer to that of the Hill, and of Seattle in general.

At the potluck, I informally asked people their biggest hope for the new year. One woman said she hoped she’d be strong enough to pass the firefighter’s exam. One man said he hoped to finally get his big break in NYC. One guy said he couldn’t think of anything to hope for politically. But others did express a generalized wish that things would get better, that the jokers running things in DC these days would become irrelevant/outplaced, and that people would start to do something, anything, to repair the planet.

The respondents invariably asked the question back at me. I said I hoped people, particularly Capitol Hill people, would start to imagine even the possibility of hope, that the whole world does not necessarily totally suck, that change is indeed possible.

This is my request for you this year: Think of your neighborhood, your community, not as a relic of America’s progressive past but as a vanguard for America’s progressive future.

Yeah, I put out a photo book late last year about Seattle’s yesterdays, including some of Capitol Hill’s yesterdays.

I want readers to see the book as more than a trip down memory lane, a wistful look back at A Simpler Time. It’s meant to be a celebration of the old Seattle, and a call to recapture at least some of its spirit.

Hard to believe, but there was a time when almost every Seattle restaurant printed the prices of every item on its menu for all to see–and did so in dollars and cents, not simply two digits and a dot. Locally-owned (or at least locally-managed) stores set fashion trends that sometimes defied those dictated by the national magazines. Local DJs promoted local rock bands on commercial top-40 radio. Local TV newscasts dared to devote whole minutes to “talking heads” discussing politics and other nonviolent topics.

Other personality traits of Seattle’s past self are more subtle. There was a spirit, a feeling that Things Could Be Done. A real city, with all bells and whistles, could be carved out of recently-conquered wilderness. We could build our own businesses, make our own art, think up our own ideas. Later, the feminist and civil-rights movements added new dimensions to this can-do attitude.

This stance went hand-in-hand with a self-effacing sense of humor. The old Seattle had writers (Betty Anderson, Emmett Watson), cartoonists (Bob Cram, Lynda Barry), and broadcasters (Bob Hardwick, Stan Boreson) who blended unpretentious whimsey and clever wit.

The old Seattle was a place more interested in living a good life than in amassing ever-bigger piles of Stuff. It was a place with a working waterfront, not a “Harbour Pointe.”

It’s that spirit I want to help bring back. And, in the old Seattle mindset, I believe we can.

So think of your immediate surroundings as The Future.

And think of your self as having a Future, beyond grunt survival.

This will be quite difficult for some of you, who’ve spent the past two decades or more bemoaning the supposed creeping fascism of everybody in America outside of yourselves and your immediate friends.

But try it.

You just might be surprised at what happens.

…from some other burg? Lonesome for Seattle’s most vibrant streetscape? Thanks to Amazon.com’s A9 site, you can now take a virtual trip up Aurora Avenue!

…the latest (sporty, streamlined, high-mileage) Oscar Meyer Wienermobile showed up, along with a video crew. Young attendees of the Center’s Children’s Festival were invited to have themselves taped extolling their love of packaged meat products in song.

And now there are Spanish-language lyrics to the “Wiener Song.” Let’s all sing along, shall we?