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.

…has come and gone. I was only there for two hours or so. I really don’t mind crowds; but crowds + excessive heat = unneeded discomfort.

Still, it’s a great people-watchin’ spectacle, and the most populist (yet also the most consumerist) of Seattle Center’s three big summer whindigs.

…honoring the early arrival of the dog days-O-summer.

CONTINUING OUR RECAPPING of events we’d documented but not uploaded during our early-summer bout of computerlessness, the Fremont Solstice Parade.

This “silent protest” just might’ve been inspired by our own photo series, Signifying Nothing.

Dr. Seuss’s Sneetches, those universal metaphors for self-titled hipsters and the futulity of exclusive scenes.

The now world-renowned body paint bicyclists and other public nudes have, for several years now, upstaged the parade’s more organized attractions. And for good reason. For two hours a year it’s quasi-legally-tolerated to appear naked on a public street, and to be seen by bystanders of all genders and ages.

Solstice Parade nudity isn’t overtly sexual. Nor is it the formally informal “natural” nudity of naturist camps and free beaches. It’s a whole other thang altogether. It’s a statement of freedom and pride, as much as anything at the Gay Pride parade the following week.

The essential message: We’ve all got bodies, and they’re all great. They’re fun to look at, and fun to live in. A simple and obvious message, but one us repressed Americans still need to hear regularly.

…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 all-new lower Queen Anne Safeway just opened today on the site of what had been one of the chain’s smallest surviving Seattle outlets. That building, a classic ’60s box structure, had been razed for a big half-block condo complex with the unfortunate name of “Tribeca”–a moniker intended to conjure images of old iron Manhattan warehouses redone into nouveau-riche loft dwellings, not brand-new stick structures.

(BTW: Safeway, while once the world’s biggest food chain, has never had a store within 300 miles of NYC.)

The store, while twice the size of its precursor, is still a compact and urbane work of “retail theater.” It has narrow carts and aisles, tall shelves, and a slightly darker color scheme. Its internal layout’s also different from the standard grocery cube we’ve known all our lives. The single entrance is toward the building’s narrow south side. The checkouts are placed diagonally along the south side, leaving space near the entrance for special promotions. The produce coolers are in the middle, not along a wall, freeing more wall space for higher-profit-margin operations (pharmacy, deli, video rentals).

It’s a pleasant, even quasi-happy place. My only gripe: Just as with Safeway’s late-’90s rebuild on 15th Avenue East, the new lower Queen Anne store abuts the sidwalk instead of hiding behind a moat of parking–but doesn’t have an entrance at its peak foot-traffic spot (in this case, Mercer Street).

…The official beverage of summer romances.

PLACEHOLDING AT A PARKING SPACE in beautiful downtown Madison Park.

NOW YOU KNOW how the good ship Goodtime gets its times so good.

SOMEBODY doesn’t like Hummers. (But nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.)

SOMETIMES a blown lighting fixture can reveal more than it conceals.

AS PROMISED, here are some of the pix I took but was unable to upload last month, starting with what’s commonly known for short as the “Gay Pride Parade” (the official name’s almost as long as the parade itself).

This year’s parade was to have been hardly different from any, except for the larger and more numerous surrounding beer gardens. (They’re here, they’re queer, they’re drinking beer.) But recent news events gave the paraders a couple extra things about which to feel proudly.

First, a court in Ontario ruled gay marriage legal in Canada’s most populous province. The move capped a half-year in which the Great White North, once seen as quaint and stuffy, suddenly attained a reputation as North America’s bastion of Euro-progressivism and (relative) political common sense.

Then the U.S. Supreme Court, in a rare victory for libertarian conservatives instead of authoritarian conservatives, said Texas couldn’t criminalize “sodomy” (a code-word for gay-male sex). G.W. Bush, who as Texas governor had supported the law, was uncharacteristically quiet about its overturning.

Thus, an event that, as late as a week before, might have held a mood of brash defiance, instead took on an air of only slightly-muted celebration for lesbians and gays, and for everybody who’s been yearning achingly for even the slightest hope.

Hope for a way out of the right-wing nightmare.

Hope for an America that would run on compassion and common sense, instead of greed and fear.

Hope for not just a more prosperous future, but for any future at all.

The new age people say anything we do to maintain a positive attitude will help us achieve our goals. Let’s hope this time they’re right.

…posted to this site in the past week, here’s some nice clean romance pulp-novel covers courtesy of the Private Screenings boutique in Fremont.

I JUST KNEW that decade-old “menswear for women” fad would finally get its logical counterpart.

…to so skillfully manipulate his wand that a beautiful girl ends up on her back, smiling angelically and floating beyond the bounds of earthly reality. (Found at the Pioneer Square Magic Shop.)

WHEN MCDONALD’S REOPENED its Third and Pine branch earlier this year (it was shut while the upstairs was remodeled into moderate-income housing units), they didn’t bring back the loud country music they’d formerly blasted out onto the sidewalk in a futile attempt to repel street loiterers. Instead, they had Ronald himself give a proxy warning.

(BTW: A fan site called McBurgers offers recipes it claims resemble the chain’s original formulae, and insists McD’s current market-share troubles would be solved if the company went back to the way it used to make things, before the efficiency experts and cost-cutters started messing everything up.)

A SURE SIGN OF SUMMER in the city: An elegant barefooted lady relaxing with her PowerBook.

Public displays of patriotic bombast were thankfully sparse at this year’s Fourth of Jul-Ivar’s gathering.

Perhaps it’s a positive sign that folks, at least around Seattle, have gotten bored by the past one-point-five years of force-fed flag-wavin’ and jingoism-spoutin’.

Abundant, however, were all the new massive condo projects just over the railroad tracks from Myrtle Edwards Park. Many of these glass boxes are still somewhat less than fully occupied.

It was a refreshingly ordinary Fourth, full of low-key people of all ages waiting around all day for a good view of the big boomies later that night. One disappointment: The musical bookings for the Fourth of Jul-Ivar’s were a lot less diverse than in prior years, emphasizing the rote-aggressive “blooze” bands that have been Seattle’s official establishment music since the ’70s.

I didn’t stay in Myrtle Edwards for the big blast, having been invited to a deck bash at a FIrst Hill condo, from which the rival Gas Works fireworks show could supposedly be seen.

But with the Metropolitan Park towers rising like twin cans of Spam (the meat product, not the email) between the condo and Lake Union, we could only see the largest or tallest of the fiery boom-booms. Still, a splendid, if cold and windy, time was had by all.

…this past First Thursday. Independent art vendors were moved one block north from Occidental Mall to Occidental Park, instead of getting banned altogether (which some of the corporate art galleries wanted).

So the unofficial, un-curated, anything-goes art bazaar continued, with more square footage and just as many buyers and sellers. The only police trouble came when Greg Kucera (one of the bigtime gallery operators who’d pushed for the indie art-sellers’ expulsion) was almost arrested while wearing a second-hand police uniform shirt.

Meanwhile, the kind of outdoor art sale the corporate gallery guys would prefer took place at the Harbor Steps development, west of First and Union. Everything was clean, slick, and quality-control-committee approved. Glass bowls and cutesy sculptures dominated. Surprisingly, it wasn’t all completely dull.

SOME MORE ENTRIES in our Space Available photo series.