…in the guise of a Presidential campaign, rolled into Seattle Sunday evening. The big event was scheduled to start at 5:30, but crowds weren’t even herded into a fenced-off Westlake Park until nearly 6. The usual political-rally opening acts (earnest singers, local political who-dats, campaign grunt operatives, and the like) sufficiently bored the teeming audience into chanting for the man himself to mount the stage. Which he finally did around 7:20.

(No local elected officials appeared onstage; neatly reinforcing Dean’s valuable public image as an insurgent loved more by the commonfolk than by Demo party bigshots.)

What he said: The expected, sure-fire, audience-pleasin’ attacks on Bush’s “election,” Bush’s corporate-crook and hate-radio friends, Bush’s deficits, Bush’s race-baiting, Bush’s homophobia, Bush’s foreign-relations disasters, and, natch, Bush’s not-as-simple-as-it-first-seemed war.

(Westlake was where most of the big antiwar marches were held around here in the past year. Dean’s after-the-fact judgment was, sadly, damn close to some of the pre-March-17 protest speakers’ worst predictions.)

Some of his sharpest barbs, naturally given that it’s the still-early days of pre-primary (and, in our state, pre-caucus) season, came against his fellow Democratic challengers; particularly the Democratic Leadership Council campers such as Joe Lieberman who, Dean alleged, are trying too hard to emulate Bush and not hard enough to oppose Bush.

Even whilst running against the DLC, Dean’s candidacy echoes many of ol’ DLC darling Bill Clinton’s early schticks. Like the 1991-model Clinton, Dean proclaims himself to be a man of the people from a heartland state-house, not a team-player from the D.C. establishment. He vows to clean out the corruption and the influence-peddling, and to bring the nation back to its onetime populist ideals.

At this point it’s working. The previously obscure ex-governor of an obscure state has pushed himself into a statistical tie for poll numbers and campaign donations. His ingenious Internet-based campaign gives him the aura of a rugged individualist, not a prepackaged product.

(In music-biz terms, Dean’s billing himself as the political equivalent of a DIY indie-rock purist, and dissing the other big Demo candidates as slick, irrelevant, major-label pretty boys.)

Dean’s got just the kind of street-cred Clinton strove for, and which no other DLC-approved candidate has ever bothered with. And despite the DLC’s official line, I believe no Democrat can beat Bush without this kind of avid ground support.

Whether Dean will get the nomination, whether he’ll get elected, and whether he’ll keep any of his many promises all remain to be seen, of course.

…was in the local region today, in a trip exquisitely planned to ensure he would see and hear from the only people he gives a damn about, zillionaires and corporate poobahs.

That didn’t stop a few hundred or so regular folks from using the occasion as an excuse to gather at Victor Steinbrueck Park, for a pleasant summer Friday afternoon of speechifyin’, T-shirt-wearin’, placcard-holdin’, and down-home togetherness.

The assorted young adults, union vets, senior citizens, Democratic Party operatives, and Greens in attendance were united by a shared idea:

That we don’t have to be paralyzed into passivity by what computer writer Dave Winer once acronymed as “FUD” (fear, uncertainty, and doubt).

That people-power indeed can take back our nation from the junta.

That we can create an America that actually cares about her people and her land.

Meanwhile, life and art go on.

…left to fend for themselves in the hostile out-of-doors.

HEARD TODAY from a reader on an ol’ fashioned phone-line connection, who said it took him over 10 minutes to load all the pix on this page. While I try to crop ’em small ‘n’ tight, if you think the site’s become too image-heavy lemme know.

ENDING OUR RECENT VISIT to the formerly-scenic Kent Valley, we come across one recent attempt to create a public space in this heavily privatized stretch of suburbia, the Interurban and Green River trails.

These hiking-biking paths wander along disused railway corridors. One of them crosses the still-scenic Green River at a restored wooden bridge. Go far enough southward on the 15-mile Interurban Trail and you’ll eventually get to where it’s still the countryside.

The Great Wall Mall, south of Ikea in the greater Tukwila-Kent-Renton sprawl, is an undoubted godsend to the thousands of Asian-American families who’ve moved there in search of slightly-less-obscene housing prices. For a casual shopper from the city, however, it has little that you can’t find in greater variety/lower prices in Seattle’s International District.

An arrangement in black and white, courtesy of a black fridge on display at Albert Lee’s in the big-box superstore desertscape surrounding Southcenter.

Tukwila’s Family Fun Center, whilst not as expansive as the Wild Waves/Enchanted Village complex in Federal Way, is still prominent enough to get its own road signs. (As well as having go-karts, mini-golf, a climbing rock, a wooden-fence maze, water-cart racing, a video arcade, and the ever-familiar sights of screeching tots, sullen teens, and nerve-wracked parents.)

Question: What’s out of place in this picture of the franchised Bullwinkle’s restaurant at the Fun Center?

Answer: The Underdog Show wasn’t made by Rocky and Bullwinkle creators Jay Ward and Bill Scott. It simply had some of the same financial backers and merchandising contracts as the Ward shows.

…was even duller than the first. About 70 of us sat around at the Kent Regional Justice Center from 8:45 until 3:00, including a long lunch from 11:00 to 1:30. Finally we were informed no trials were ready for us to be picked for. Thus ended our obligation to the People of King County.

With time on my hands in a corner of Puget Sound country I never get to otherwise, I of course had to photograph what sights there were to be seen. And there were many.

The original downtown Kent is a beautifully sited and constructed little town. It’s compact, has great all-American architecture, and is bedecked with well-groomed shade trees.

The only problem with downtown Kent is you can’t shop there for life’s basics (aside from tires and mufflers). As in so many other U.S. towns, Kent’s food, drug, and clothing stores have all fled to the outer sprawl. Former supermarkets now house a carpet store and a discout outlet cutely named “Stupid Prices.”

AS YOU CAN SEE ABOVE, yr. dangerously underemployed web editor bit the proverbial bullet of credit card debt and attained a replacement digicam.

The particular scene is the King County Regional Justice Center in the much-maligned suburban community of Kent, right in between the vestigial old small town and the strip-mall and office-park barrenscape. This big, magnificent 1997 building is NOT a grandiose waste-O-taxpayer-$$, in my opine. In places such as Kent where private-sector architecture’s particularly brutal & grim, we need governments to show what the built environment can be like when it’s made with care for the people who have to move through it.

Today, I was one who had to move through it. Called for jury duty, I spent a long under-caffinated morning being herded from room to room, listening to judges’ lectures and watching an instructional video on the juror’s responsibilities narrated by the late Raymond Burr (who probably did more to popularize misunderstandings about the trial process than anybody in U.S. history). At the end of all this, a state attorney kicked me out of the trial being empaneled that day. I get to go back Tuesday and make myself available for other trials.

Following that misadventure, I finally got to dine at an indie BBQ joint I’ve long heard about and even written about, the legendary Cave Man Kitchens. It’s one of those “you need no teeth to eat our beef” places. The meat is smoked and melt-in-your-mouth; the sauce is sweet and tomato-ey. Good eatin’. (Though I prefer the Pecos Pit on First Avenue South.)

ANOTHER FRIDAY, another sample of pix from our ongoing Space Available project.

PRIOR TO OUR RECENT BOUT WITH CAMERALESSNESS, we visited the fabulous Tacoma museum district. We’ll go back again soon for the Museum of Glass’s new exhibit of Japanese anime artifacts.

What was around to see that day were two slick yet cool exhibits at the Washington State History Museum.

First, the permanent exhibits about the first century and a half of Caucasian settlement in the Great NW, including a re-creation of the “Hooverville” homeless camp (at the modern-day site of Safeco Field) and a “tree” displaying some of the many valuable products made from local wood.

Upstairs in the same building is 1001 Curious Things, taken from the vast collections of Seattle’s historically vital tourist-trinket stand, Ye Old Curiosity Shop. The shop used to commission Alaska tribes to make authentic totem poles and scrimshaws, and also bought, stuffed, and mounted selected freaks of the animal kingdom (below).

The state museum’s a huge, grand place that’s got its act fully together. It doesn’t just show cool stuff; it mounts entertaining narrative exhibitions with storylines worthy of any Discovery Channel documentary. Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, scheduled to move into the temporary downtown-library space on Pike Street late next year, will have to do a lot to reach the state museum’s level of attractiveness and intrigue.

TODAY, more proof there’s beauty everywhere in our town, even in the no-person’s-land known as Interbay. (Please, don’t let ’em put up a strip mall there.)

JUST ‘CAUSE IT’S FRIDAY, some more images from our ongoing Space Available series.

…why I haven’t put her picture up on this site.

…to Troy Hackett, co-owner of Philly’s Best cheesesteak shop on 23rd Avenue, easily the best indie fast-food place in Seattle today. I’d met Hackett a few times, both at and away from the restaurant, and always found him to be a gentle, well-humored gent with a mind set on building his business and his heart set on having fun. (This image depicts Philly’s Best’s mobile kitchen, which had already been installed at Seattle Center on Feb. 15 for a black community festival when an antiwar rally was booked for the same date.)

JUST BECAUSE I CAN, I’m slipping y’all some more pix from last Saturday’s Seafair Torchlight Parade; starting with these proud finishers of the preliminary “fun run.” (Someone, somewhere, must have defined the differences between running for “fun” and organized masochism. If you know where such a written differentiation exists, please tell me.)

Yeah, there were a couple of serious rowdy incidents among the 300,000 spectators, leading to three non-fatal injuries. But you won’t see the municipal bureaucracy trying to ban the whole event, like they did to the Pioneer Square Mardi Gras. Seafair’s too entrenched. And that’s good.

We need something at the heart of Seattle’s civic life that reminds us of the town’s rougher, louder, scruffier past; of the days before every damn thing in town had to be world-fucking-class.

That’s what Seafair is, and that’s why I like it.

FOR THE UMPTEENTH CONSECUTIVE YEAR, this corner continues to refuse to hate the Seafair parade. Sorry, all ye conformist non-conformists out there; but I happen to like big crowds sharing in the celebration of the simple act of being alive on a late summer night.

This giant balloon represents an energy-saving home fluorescent bulb.