…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.

BAD NEWS: Of the four currently-being-debated plans for renovating Seattle Center, three of them (all except the “do nothing” plan) call for razing the Fun Forest. The slightly seedy but still functional Forest is Washington state’s last permanent, year-round (more or less), pre-Disney-style amusement park. It’s as close as you can get here to old-time “carny” culture. It shouldn’t be scrapped for an undefined “family activity area.” It should be preserved, even upgraded to compete with the likes of Wild Waves.

…with a high-profile rally at Seattle Center and a downtown parade, has now officially bankrupted its organizers. But another group has already stepped forward to stage at least something for this year, at the festival’s old Capitol Hill stomping grounds.

…(which officially has a name almost as long as the parade itself) won’t be ending with a rally at Seattle Center this year. Last year’s parade-rally, moved to downtown and the Center from Capitol Hill, gave the event greater “mainstream” visibility but lost $100,000. So it’s probably back to the (relatively) low rent district, away from the retail core and Belltown as well as the International Fountain.

…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?

…has issued its findings. Thankfully, they want to keep Center House and the Fun Forest, albeit with some serious upgrading. Memorial Stadium would be replaced by an “open space” above underground parking. And the Sonics would get most of the KeyArena redo money they want.

…about the Supersonics’ threatened move to the suburbs: It could, if it goes through, symbolize the Sowetoization of metropolitan Seattle. Our city built on seven hills is becoming a Mounds city—white on the inside, chocolate on the outside.

As my ex-Stranger colleague Charles Mudede has noted several times, Seattle’s housing hyperinflation has caused the geographic center of its African-American community to move south, from the Central Area to the Rainier Valley and now to the ol’ Green River valley ‘burbs of Renton, Kent, and Tukwila. So they’d be a perfect new home for NBA basketball, the semi-official Official Sport of Black America.

Given that, I still want the team to stay here in town.

Though I don’t go to many games, I like the fact that they’re here. I like the noise and energy their fans add (even in a lousy season like this past one) to Seattle Center and lower Queen Anne. I take civic pride in the inevitable Space Needle shots accompanying the sponsor billboard every time ESPN or TNT comes to telecast a Sonics game. The season the team spent in Tacoma just wasn’t the same.

I’ve been reading the usual screeds of the usual sports-hating hippies who not only don’t want to pay to keep the Sonics, but might possibly pay ’em to leave. I disagree. As I’ve written before here, I believe an amenable resolution to the team’s latest demands can be found, in the context of a larger Seattle Center redo that preserves the Center’s multi-use, multi-generational spirit.

Yes, that resolution will require the team to be responsible capitalists and not rely on heavy public subsidies and favors. But I’d demand the same from the oil companies, the drug companies, the insurance companies, etc. etc.

Every few years or so, somebody comes up with a huge master plan for Seattle Center. The latest of these somebodies is a Mayor Nickels-appointed task force. They’d like to modernize Center House and the Fun Forest, and demolish the awkward, rickety High School Memorial Stadium.

Meanwhile, ex-Seattle Weekly mogul David Brewster has submitted a more extreme plan. In keeping with his lifelong ideology of baby-boomer bias, Brewster’s plan would eradicate all Center facilities that serve clienteles significantly younger or less affluent than himself.

Brewster would raze Memorial Stadium, Mercer Arena (formerly the Arena, formerly the Ice Arena), the Fun Forest, Center House (formerly the Food Circus, formerly a National Guard armory), the North Court meeting rooms (including the Snoqualmie Room, where the Vera Project’s all-ages rock shows will move later this year), and maybe even the new and popular Fisher Pavilion. And he apparently wouldn’t mind seeing the Sonics leave town so he could erase KeyArena (formerly the Coliseum) as well.

In the place of all these funky, un-slicked-up, well-used facilities, Brewster would like to see—nothing.

Albeit, it would be a lushly landscaped nothing, with lotsa grass and trees. Maybe there’d be some gourmet sidewalk cafes and used-book pushcarts. Maybe there’d be some outdoor ampitheater spaces, which would replace a few of the many indoor performance venues Bumbershoot and Folklife would lose.

Brewster’s Seattle Times essay notes that when Seattle Center was originally being planned to take over the 1962 World’s Fair grounds, it was made to accommodate many interest groups and population segments. He’d now like to replace that “cacophany” with a unified vision of a “glorious urban park.”

I happen to love the cacophany. And I want to keep it.

Too much of Seattle (hell, too much of America) has already been subsumed by the ultra-bland upscale monoculture. Publicly-owned treasures such as Seattle Center should resist this trend. They should always belong to everyone. They should always have a place for senior square-dancers, for working families, for teens, for minorities, for fast-food eaters, and for us Century 21 nostalgists who still want to believe in a festive future.

We can have contemplative green spaces, too. And we can have upscale dineries and theatrical venues. Just not only those.

So, I propose: Anything cut out from today’s Center gets put back into tomorrow’s Center. The only exception would be the high-school football games. They can move to some current school-district-owned property (such as one of those grade schools threatened with closure), or even to Husky Stadium or Qwest Field. Down in the Beaver State, Corvallis High has long played its football games at Oregon State’s stadium (and often had better winning records than OSU). The fact that neither Brewster nor the Nickels task force bothers to talk about where the high-school games would go just shows how ivory-tower (or condo-tower) their POVs are.

As for the rest: The Sonics, in their plea for another taxpayer-subsidized arena remodel, say they want a food court and an amusement arcade. Fine. Let ’em buy out the Fun Forest operators. An altered arena complex could incorporate replacements for the Fun Forest and the Center House food court. (These restaurants and arcades should be open to the general public, not only to arena event-goers.)

The arena should also be refitted to be more favorable to hockey. The NHL is dying in Sunbelt cities where it doesn’t belong; I’m convinced one of those southern-tier teams would fare far better in a northern town with major Canadian connections.

I’d keep Fisher Pavilion and its popular rooftop deck.

The empty lawn surrounding KCTS east of Mercer Arena could become a landscaped play area, replacing the wading pool north of KeyArena (and relocating the “atomic” neon lights from there).

The other Center House and Northwest Court functions (Vera, the Center School, the Seattle Children’s Museum, the square dances, the conferences, Bumbershoot’s visual arts) could go into new structures on the Center’s periphery, perhaps at the Mercer Arena site and retaining its facade. These new buildings could be included in the same funding package and construction schedule as the arena redo.

That would leave Center House available for implosion. In its hole might go some of the green spaces and outdoor amenities Brewster wants.

But, in my heart-O-hearts, I like Center House. I like the swords-into-plowshares idea of a bulky military warehouse now devoted to fun and games. It’s a grand old building, with a lot of life left in it. And besides, I like the Mongolian BBQ and the Pizza Haven.

Maybe Brewster would slag folk like me for not possessing a will to civic greatness. Too bad.

I don’t want a civic center with good taste. I want a civic center that tastes good.

• “The Star Wars Guy” succumbs to his own personal demons.
• The Belltown Messenger‘s own Ronald Holden wrote a letter to the P-I thanking its editors for their recent anti-censorship statement. His letter got censored.
• Now that China’s prez has moved on to the Other Washington, here are all the “Hu” puns you’ll ever need.
• The ’05-’06 Sonics season was softball on the court, hardball at City Hall. (How I’d resolve this: Let the Sonics buy out the Fun Forest’s operators, move those attractions to the west and north sides of KeyArena (though preserving the Snoqualmie Room for the Vera Project’s all-ages rock shows), and have the city revamp the current Fun Forest indoor amusement arcade into new meeting and exhibition rooms.)

…list-O-linx today, shall we? We shall:

• In the news today, the art deco ferry Kalakala finally gets a piece of good news, in the form of official historic status…. Mayor Nickels’s plan for a Boston-like strip-club zone in the Industrial District moves forward, despite the need to preserve the area for industrial employment…. The Vera Project’s all-ages rock shows will indeed move to the Seattle Center Snoqualmie Room after all, but not until this fall….
• Christopher Frizzelle’s Stranger essay on the doomed-for-development, 100-year-old building housing Seattle’s most hardcore gay bathhouse is notable for several reasons. Chief among them: The research Frizzelle put into the story, giving a sense of history and continuity to a place known for the most fleeting and anonymous of social encounters.
• Virginia Belle asks Democrats to stand up and take pride in themselves for once.
• I’d already been reading online about the amazing bus-only transit system of Curitiba, Brazil, when Jaime Lerner, the architect and ex-mayor who masterminded the thing, came to Seattle to promote his lessons learned. The Curitiba system can basically be described as like a light rail system, only it uses buses on bus-only road lanes instead of trains on tracks. Seattle already has one “busway,” down the industrial district south of the now-shuttered transit tunnel. Future busways could take the place of the now-aborted monorail project, across from the south end of the existing busway into West Seattle, and up through Elliott Avenue/15th Avenue West into Ballard. Bus-only lanes could be added beside, above, or beneath current streets/bridges, or (even cheaper) rededicated from current auto use. Worth thinking about, at least.
• Remember what I said last week about the ’06 Mariners looking pretty good? Strike that; reverse it.

Sleep. Take a staggering variety of cold/flu medications. Sleep. Refrain from eating, in whole or in part. Consume bag after bag of store-brand cough drops. Listen to people tell me everybody’s been getting this debilitating bug, whatever it is. Make bad puns about the bird flu (“Of course it did; it didn’t walk!”). Cough up substances you don’t want me to describe, in mass quantities. Skip out on about half a dozen meetups, parties, Belltown Messenger interviews, etc. Sleep. Briefly attend a Drinking Liberally meeting at which I hear King County Executive Ron Sims talk informally about tying in any KeyArena rebuild with a larger Seattle Center makeover (he gave no specific suggestions as to what he’d like to add or delete from the complex). Sleep.

While the world was passing me by, an odd li’l Stranger essay suggested we might as well go ahead and let the Seattle Post-Intelligencer die. I, of course, utterly disagree. Ideally, I’d like the P-I to come out of its joint operating agreement with the SeaTimes as a viable, fully-independent, full-size daily. If that can’t be achieved, there are other options for keeping Seattle a two-daily town:

• Keep the JOA more or less as it is. If this is even feasible now (the Times says it isn’t), it might not be in a few years, as the new electronic media continue to drain ad revenue away from ol’ newsprint.
• Turn the P-I into an online-only operation, as the Stranger piece suggested. Intriguing but ultimately insufficient. There’s still not enough money in Net ads to support a local, mass-market operation employing 100 or more full-time journalists. One day, the money might be there.
• Turn the P-I into a separately-run section within the Times, like the current three pages of P-I Focus within the Sunday Times. The Las Vegas JOA was renegotiated a few years back, turning the Las Vegas Sun into a six- to ten-page features section within each day’s Las Vegas Review-Journal. Such an insert section might include strictly local news, features, and opinion pieces; leaving the Times itself to run stock tables, weather, sports stats, TV listings, comics, puzzles, wire copy, and syndicated columns. Such a solution would keep the P-I‘s “voice” in the public eye, albeit as a “kept” dependent to the Times.
• Turn the P-I into a freebie tabloid, either within or outside of a JOA. Free mini-dailies began in Europe in the ’90s, and are now found in a handful of U.S. cities (NYC, Chicago, Frisco, DC, Philly). They tend to be scrawny li’l things, offering the same content as regular dailies but far less of each department.Still, they provide the best current hope for a rethinking of the whole newspaper concept. Today’s big-city dailies have the same content mix they had 50 years ago, only they’ve gotten duller. There’s no absolute reason why we still have to have full local, world, sports, business, and “living” sections in every paper. There’s no reason except tradition to still print stock prices, or for the comics page to be two dozen tiny, mostly unimaginative, gag strips.

As I’ve written a few times before, the prospect of a post-JOA P-I allows all of us news fans to imagine a new type of paper for a new century. Let’s keep the imagining going. If the P-I doesn’t morph into our brave new paper, let’s start it up ourselves.

The 12th Man flag is back up on the Space Needle (or, as my pal Angelina calls it, the Spice Noodle) after having been taken down Friday night for Windstorm 2006. The pregame hype-athon is already underway. I’m psyched. I’m primed.

My big dream last night: The game’s inexplicably taking place on a Monday afternoon. But I miss most of it because I’d rather see a small intimate concert (at some place like Gallery 1412) by a noted female performance-art star who tells seriocomic monologues, accompanying herself on the cello. It’s a fascinating act, but I leave as soon as I can to catch the fourth quarter. I run to the nearest bar (ok, the nearest bar I like, which in this dream world happens to be in south Wallingford on Lake Union).

By then, the Hawks are behind 7-3; it’s apparently been a dogged defensive battle. But sure enough, our boys come through with a fumble recovery leading to a TD run in the last five minutes. (The refs spot the ball as being down within the five yard line, then our boys stick it in on the subsequent play.) The rest of the game is spent holding the other guys’ offense, a task which seems almost lost when the other guys complete a bomb pass into the red zone. But subsequent pass plays are broken up, including one in which the football lands helplessly on the ground in the end zone. Subdued celebrations commence throughout town, aided by a beautiful, unpredicted, gentle snowfall. (There are even snow flurries back inside the stadium, which in the real world won’t happen at the domed Ford Field.)

(Snow, as some of our longtime readers may know, has always symbolized boyish innocence and unfettered joy to me.)

The dream game’s results, of course, don’t predict the real game’s results. But they do reflect my own attitude.

I’ll watch the game at a WiFi-less bar, so don’t expect blogging-in-progress. I’ll write a big post-mortem later today or early tomorrow.

…another Bumbershoot. Seattle’s own all-you-can-eat arts buffet turned 35 this year, and seemed at times to show its age.

This year’s fest had an unspoken theme of punk nostalgia, with such headline acts as Elvis Costello, the New York Dolls, and Iggy Pop with (some of) his original Stooges–not to mention two different displays of pomo concert-poster art (the all-comers Flatstock and the invite-only “Art of Modern Rock”). Fourteen years after KNDD’s first “Resurrection Jukebox” show, it’s still weird for me to see the musical idols of my own young-adulthood marketed as golden oldies.

Not a nostalgia act, not really a “comeback” either ’cause they never really went away, the Posies wowed ’em with a new organ-enhanced sound and Ken Stringfellow’s still-youthful physique.

The giant posterized face of Rashard Lewis peers down at Sonics fans, prior to the start of what would be the team’s last game of the postseason, as if to apologize for the debilitating foot injury that kept him out of the second-round series.

The team fought mightily and valiantly. But without one of its pivotal star players, the Sonics found themselves ousted by San Antonio at the last half-second of game six.

But look on the bright side: Nobody expected this Seattle team to even make the playoffs, let alone almost make the conference finals. And the Lucking Fakers aren’t even in the dance this year!

…is finally at hand, thankfully. It can be a mighty tiring time, as this gent and his plastic horses would agree.

Seattle’s very own all-you-can-eat culture buffet began in 1970. It was originally a free festival, devised to employ baby-boomer artist types and their favorite bar-blues bands. It was also designed to utilize the whole of the Seattle Center grounds for one big thang, for the first time since the 1962 World’s Fair.

Over the years, its organizers realized the drawing power of current big-name rock bands. These “mainstage” gigs became the metaphoric tail wagging the “dog” of the festival’s local-artists’ exposure.

The fees for major rock stars escalated in the ’80s, and skyrocketed in the ’90s. (The additional income went not to the musicians, but to assorted parasitic middlemen). To pay these higher costs, Bumbershoot started charging admission fees; first modest, then a little less modest.

To draw a Center full of patrons at these prices, organizers had to keep bidding on the top touring bands, driving the costs up further. Ticket prices rose from $0 for all four days to $20 per day.

Eventually this cycle will have to slow down. Already there are signs that the mega-concert industry’s teetering on the fiscal brink, due to the greed of monopolistic promoters pushing prices beyond what the market will bear.

And Bumbershoot learned in the past two years that it can get along just fine with alterna-rock reunion acts—who just might be among the first touring giants to attempt to break off from the likes of Clear Channel.

Fortunately, the original Bumbershoot spirit of mass play has survived, with tens of thousands gathering to share one last summer blast.