…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.

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.