Above and below, the former Les Piafs boutique on Second. (It moved to become the only locally-owned retailer in the city-subsidized downtown mall Pacific Place.)

Above and below, the former Land Rover showroom on Westlake. (It moved into the historic Lincoln-Mercury building up the street.)

Cardhaus, the role-playing-game parlor on Roosevelt that opened after Wizards of the Coast’s more elaborate game room closed, is just plain gone.

A SIMPLE HOLIDAY GREETING in the form of a little doll left behind when the Continental Store, Seattle’s favorite German deli and gift shop, moved last week.

AT NORDSTROM, even the homeless men are color coordinated.

NOT ALL Lord of the Rings fans are geekboys. Some are geekgirls.

ABOVE AND BELOW, some more of our Space Available series. This time, the former Gee Whiz coffeehouse on Fifth.

Who’d’ve thunk it? Noam Chomsky, academic-left theoretician and author of obscure incendiary anti-Bush tracts, has become a famous enough name, at least in this town, to become an ad slogan for a regional chain of seven bookstores.

You know you’re a word-usage freak when this sign makes you stop and think not about its message, but about whether it should say “1 in 7 is” or “1 in 7 are.”

Above and below, anonymous sidewalk chalk art found downtown.

FOR THE RETURN of Foto Friday to this site, some of the lovely lamps of Uptown Espresso’s Fourt and Wall branch.

THIS PAST FIRST THURSDAY, the Forgotten Works space found a way to become a little less forgotten. It held a big, wide-open holiday art sale, with as many works (all limited to 8″ x 10″) as would fit on the walls.

The previous first Thursday, the Nico Gallery space (where my own City Light, City Dark premiered) held a live dance/performance/whatever event entitled Flipeography. Seven dancers, spaced around the room, held static poses until passersby touched them to cue a “flip” to a new pose.

Castle, the multi-state sex-shop operation we once described here as “buying chains from a chain store,” opened a new outlet on Broadway, in a former Wherehouse music store. (Just think: They could’ve kept the old sign and just changed the third letter.)

Most of Castle’s branches are self-contained big-box (pun unintentional) buildings with plain storefronts. Its first Seattle store, on Fairview between the Seattle Times and Hooters, is so minimally marked you essentially have to already know it’s there. But the Broadway store’s got a big open display window, inherited from its prior tenant. Everyone who passes by can see what’s in the windows (so far, fetish wear and Xmas decorations). Everyone who passes by can see when you enter and leave. (But they don’t have to know what you bought.)

Still, for intimate goods I’d still recommend a more intimate store, such as Toys in Babeland.

Meanwhile, Abercrombie & Fitch announced this week it won’t make any more of its wacky catalogs, infamous for their use of naked models to sell clothes.

Say what you will about the chain, but its catalog was the original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It taught a generation of iron-jawed frat boys to think of themselves as objectified sex toys; as exemplified by the photo-op models seen here at the downtown Seattle store on the day after Thanksgiving.

ON NOV. 30, Doug Nufer emceed the final installment in the Titlewave used-book store’s monthly live reading series, after nine years. We’ll miss ’em.

EVEN THOUGH I HAVEN’T posted any new pix to the site since I began the novel writing marathon/sprint, I’ve kept taking them. Starting today, a non-chronological sampling.

First off, Monday night’s visit to Scarecrow Video by self-proclaimed B-movie schlockmeister and Troma Films cofounder Lloyd Kaufman, plugging his new book and forthcoming DVD Make Your Own Damn Movie.

Kaufman’s minimal-budget horror comedies aren’t always funny and are rarely horrific. But, unlike so many other exploitation parodists, Kaufman has always kept his films brisk and entertaining. He’s one of the last old-time showbiz promoters. His public speaking style is exactly like his filmmaking style–the Troma films, the Troma promos, the Troma branding, and Kaufman himself are of one unified whole. He and partner Michael Herz have stayed in business and independent for three decades by making a consistent product that never goes out of style; by incessantly promoting even their oldest titles; and by maintaining a roster of trademarked costumed characters, which generate merchandising fees and which don’t depend on costly star actors.

In the lecture’s most entertaining segment, Kaufman recounted a filmmaking workshop he’d run at the Rhode Island Film Festival. He and his students had to film part of a decidedly non-Tromaesque student-written script, a talky love scene between an Israeli boy and a Palestinian girl. Kaufman showed two versions of the scene. The first version was acted as written. The second was done “the Troma way,” with histrionic overacting, harsh camera angles, and an out-of-nowhere gore stunt stuck in.

It was a cute joke, but it also made a point: “The Troma way” isn’t the only way to make an indie film. But then again, neither is the Tarantino way, or the talky-love-scene way.

AN ACQUAINTANCE NAMED RUSSELL held a “Loud Jacket Party” last Saturday night. The loudest jacket I currently own is a double-breasted navy blue number with silver pinstripes, but nobody seemed to mind.

My favorite new local band, Lushy (more about them on a future date, I promise) played two sets of ultracool jazz-pop. Delicately tasty cocktails were served up by trained professionals. Party guests read aloud from Russian history books when they couldn’t think of anything witty to say, which wasn’t often.

The center and right faces in this pic belong to the extraordinary party goddess DJ Superjew and cool-and-strange-music connisseur Otis F. Odder.

I didn’t dress up. But I went where I’d find other people who’d dressed up, and asked if I could take their pictures. Almost everyone agreed. Herewith, some samples.

This barista is wearing an authentic 1950s UW cheerleader uniform from the Red Light.

‘TWAS A GRAND NITE at the Crocodile on Thursday, when my ol’ pal and fellow scene-documentator Charles Peterson debuted his latest and ultimate book collection of rock n’ roll imagery, Touch Me I’m Sick.

It’s truly a splendid hardcover coffee-table tome, and a vast improvement over the editing and production job done on his now-out-of-print 1995 collection Screaming Life. You should all rush out and get a copy promptly, so you can drool and marvel at all the up-close moments of pure rockin’ Hi-NRG, in glorious monochrome.

The book release party was a spectacular gala, a flashy party, and a reunion of the pre-Nevermind Seattle music community (at least of those members of that community who are still alive but aren’t homebound with kids). Among them: Sub Pop founder Bruce Pavitt, who played DJ and spun some truly rare vinyl by Devo, Mudhoney, and others of the era.

Of course, yr. web editor couldn’t resist an opportunity to photograph the evening’s live bands, Girl Trouble (above) and the Briefs, in imitation of Peterson’s inimitable style.

ANOTHER OCTOBER, another Northwest Bookfest. (Or, as I like to call it, the World of Words Lit-O-Rama.)

With corporate donations drying up, organizers laid off most of their paid staff this year and enforced a cover price for the first time. But it seemed to go off more or less smoothly and with almost as many attendees to the ex-naval air station at Sand Point.

Of course, it helps if you have an extra added attraction to bring the punters in, such as a live pony…

…or a stuffed bird…

…or a guy in a lion suit acting toward the ladies like, well, like a predator.

It also helps if you’ve got many of the Northwest’s brightest literary lights. Sure Jonathan Raban, Sherman Alexie, and Fred Moody all had neato things to say, but the crowd gave the true superstar treatment to Book Lust author and “Librarian Action Figure” model Nancy Pearl. (Who deserves every bit of her adoration.)

The books, of course, are the real stars of Bookfest. There were thousands of ’em, from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again.

And there were readers, too. Besides the big names mentioned above, print MISC contributors Stacey Levine and Matt Briggs appeared on a panel organized by Clear-Cut Press. (They’re separated here by Corrina Wyckoff.)

Bookfest has essentially replaced one role of Bumbershoot, the role of Seattle’s big start-of-bad-weather public fete. We gather together one more time to proclaim our readiness to shut ourselves in for the winter with printed entertainment for company.

And we get to feed the seagulls while we’re at it.

SINCE IT’S BEEN A FEW DAYS since we added to this site, here’s a few images that speak for themselves.

A FEW SIGHTS of the now-not-just-officially-but-really-done summer of ought-three…

…And a little preview of the weeks to come.

APPLE COMPUTER’S second company-owned store in the region opened last weekend in Seattle’s rapidly upscaling University Village shopping center.

As was the case with Apple’s Bellevue Square opening earlier this year, a line snaked out over the mall grounds on opening night. By the time the first customers were let in at six, guys (and it was almost all guys) at the end of the line would have more than an hour’s wait.

The new Apple Store, built from scratch on the onetime site of an A&P supermarket (remember those, anyone?), is much bigger than the Bellevue store, which had to be squeezed into an ex-Hallmark shop site. Thus, it more fully expresses the company’s aim of providing a real-world equivalent to the Mac OS’s clean, uncluttered, dignified aesthetic of cyberspace.

Live entertainment was provided on Friday by a subset of the UW Marching Band (above), and on Saturday with a 15-minute free set by Euro power-poppers the Raveonettes (below).

(Incidentally, the Apple Store’s free Wi-Fi signal reaches next door to the Ram sports bar, but just barely.)

Meanwhile, other businesses in the neighborhood have gotten into the cyber-craze, as seen in this exploitation of an already-tired Internet catch phrase.

I could add that I walked from the Village uphill to the University District late Saturday night, past the Greek Row where rowdy frat boys rioted after midnight. I left before that happened, but could sense a tension in the air, an angry and ornery sound of “fun” emanating from many of the fraternities and rental houses on the first Saturday night of the school year.

…has come and gone, alas, without a pennant, a division title, or even a lousy wild-card berth. And it’s all because of a half-dozen or so needless losses in August and September to teams we shoulda beat more often (Rangers, Orioles, Angels).

Now what? This might very well have been the final go-around for the current core M’s lineup. Edgar Martinez may very well be gone next year; so could Mike Cameron, Mark McLemore, Freddy Garcia, Carlos Guillen, and Joel Piniero. The ’04 Mariners could easily become a “rebuilding year” squad. The Supersonics have had seven rebuilding years in a row, so you know what that could mean.

On the other glove, the M’s just might acquire just the right just-before-their-peak young players and/or seasoned vets to finally get over the top. I hope for that, but expect otherwise.

AS PREVIOUSLY PROMISED, here’s the rest of our Puyallup Fair pix.

Yes, fair audiences are literate and informed about developments that affect their lives–such as environmental degredation, as with this big scale model of water drainage and flood plains

I’m not so sure it’s that bright an idea to promote a yellowish-colored liquid with an image of a dog.

The last building we visited that Friday was the “Hobby Center,” in which dozens of citizens displayed the results of their respective manias for collecting useless memorabilia of pop-cult sub-sub-genres. Not pictured here: The all-Pepsi-stuff display, the all-Picachu-stuff display, and the reproduction wooden plaque reading “Be Naughty, Give Santa a Rest.”