• So, like is this Capitol Hill retail mainstay claiming it’s barren and lonesome enough to successfully hide out in?
• Forty years after its founding, and six years after developers first threatened to demolish it for a six-story apartment complex, Capitol Hill’s legendary B&O Espresso may finally be doomed, at least as we know it. The developers plan to have a restaurant/retail space in their new building at the corner of Belmont and Olive (hence the coffee house/bistro’s name). But that space will be half the size of today’s B&O.
• KIRO-TV is still stalling in talks with its unionized technical staff. The station doesn’t explicitly want to bust the union, just to take away most of the things union crews get to do, like complain about hours and working conditions.
• Masins Furniture is leaving Pioneer Square. The Seattle Times-approved reason: The neighborhood is beset by costly parking and, you know, those people. A more likely reason: Two and a half years without folks moving into new urban housing units, and without a lot of folks having the funds to refurnish the housing units they’ve got.
• Labor Day Weekend Thought #1: How long does it take to turn from unemployed to “effectively unemployable”?
• Labor Day Weekend Thought #2: Robert Reich wants a Labor Day with fewer picnics and more protests.
• Word (or rather phrase) of the day: Mighty Whitey. Refers to the long tradition of the fictional white hero who not only sympathize with other ethnicities’ struggles “but also becomes their greatest warrior/leader/representative.” Cf. Last of the Mohicans, Snow Falling On Cedars, Avatar, and most recently The Help. Also see every white blues/soul/rap musician, especially if British.

• Despite what Republican politicians would have you believe, Washington state actually leads the nation in new business creation these days.
• One of these new businesses will be a downtown JC Penney store, in the old Kress five-and-dime store building at Third and Pike. That’s just a block from the old (1930-82) Penney store (Target’s going in on that site later this year). It’s great news, but what will become of the loveable, and vitally needed, Kress IGA supermarket in the building’s lower level? Its operators insist they’ve got a long term lease and are staying no matter what.
• It’s not just the state civil payroll that’s ethnically un-diverse. The state legislature is only 6.8 percent nonwhite.
• Local theater blogger Jose Aguerra asks whether local troupes are being too coy and inoffensive, even in their depiction of female orgasms. (In my day, Seattle’s live theaters prided themselves on presenting edgy, daring material, even if the promise was grander than the product.)
• A UW Medical Center administrator got caught embezzling a quarter mil from the hospital. You’re only hearing about it now because the state auditor made a statement publicly praising the U for how it investigated and prosecuted the inside thief. A potential huge scandal was thus turned into a low-key moment of triumph for the administration. At least if you read the Seattle Times version of the story. KOMO offers a far more critical spin on the affair.
• Grist.org’s David Roberts ponders what the heck Friends of the Earth is doing getting involved with right-wing lobby groups in proposing a “green” federal budget slashing scheme.
• The link we ran last week about the electric-guitar company? The company that got raided by federal agents, who were supposedly looking for endangered imported wood? The company flatly denies all allegations. And the Murdoch Wall St. Journal, ever eager to bash anything environmentalist, claims the feds could next go after folks who own old vintage instruments that contain now-restricted components.
• Should any of us care about speculation about the new Apple CEO’s private life? Ars Technica says no.
• Birth rates are dropping in many countries, especially those where female fetuses are sometimes selectively aborted. The Economist calculates some countries, at their current rates of decline, could totally run out of people in 600-700 years. Of course, if you’re not a dystopian scifi fan you know trends don’t stay the same, at the same rate, forever.
• Sasha Brown-Worsham believes “we should parent more like they did in 1978.” More Boo Berry and daytime TV; less overprotectiveness and constant fear.

(in no particular order):

• Yes, I will want to have sex with you. Pretty much immediately. ESPECIALLY if I’m too timid to come out and say so. Be aware of this.
• I’d rather you didn’t complain to me about the guys you sleep with, whilst refusing to sleep with me.
• I have a large repertoire of firmly held, and occasionally contradictory, beliefs. You can try to change some of them if you want to.
• I watch TV. I eat meat. I don’t smoke pot. You won’t be able to change any of these.
• I have a lot of persnickety minor food allergies and strange food dislikes. I won’t expect you to know all of them right away. For now, just know that if you order the two of us an almond-encrusted dessert, you’ll get to eat all of it.
• I enjoy images of the female figure. This does not mean I hate women; it means I like women.
• I may have a “baby face,” but I’m over 50, under 5′ 10″, and beer bellied. Looking for a tall dark prince? Keep looking.
• I’m among the long term unemployed. I don’t think it’s romantic or noble. I want to change it. I want a real job. The specific real job I want changes. Sometimes what I want is an office cubicle with my name on it. I want to process data, perform boring routines, and get a deserved compensation.
• Some women have said they would be too intense for me to deal with. In the past, I have had capital-R Relationships with a D.I.D. patient, a bipolar alcoholic, and two women who expected me to casually agree that all males were intrinsically evil. I believe I can handle “intense.”
• People call me “A Writer.” I’ve always rejected that title, and the “romantic” stereotypes associated with it. I have no interest in living in a cabin on an island. I have no interest in becoming famous only after I’m dead. I have no interest in becoming dead.
• I don’t want to be your dependent, your co-dependent, your enabler, your user, your abuser, your enemy, your submissive, your dog, your platonic friend, your gay friend, or your girlfriend. I want to be your boyfriend.
• My sexual fetish is Love.

So David Stern apparently doesn’t know how to run a sports league during a recession. He’s talking openly about letting the NBA’s weaker franchises die. Anything, I suppose, to keep Seattle from getting its rightful due.

(Cross-posted with the Belltown Messenger.)

Tim Girvin is one of the world’s foremost logo designers and corporate branding gurus. For three decades, he and his staff have worked on everything from movie ad campaigns to complete “identity packages” for products and companies. He has branch offices in New York and Tokyo; we met at his main office on Stewart Street.

On business challenges in this economy:

“The thing that is really interesting to consider now is two words. One is intention. The other is attention. They both come from “tenet,” and tenet is principle. In this tough time, what do you stand by? What is the guiding factor by which you brand your business? The ones I’ve found most successful are the businesses that have this clear. The ones I find having the most challenges are the most chaotic.”

On his current projects:

“We’re doing local things, supporting local businesses—like creating a new restaurant design, a new perfume, a new retail concept, helping a local university, and doing some charitable work.

“We’re working on repositioning luxury products in Sweden, new brand storytelling strategy for Japanese cosmetics in Tokyo, international hospitality and hotel/resort work, global food and beauty assignments.”

On the essence of branding:

“The idea of the brand really is about the commitment to passion and focus. A lot of the work that we do is about how that story can be told. I find more often than not the real power of the brand is with the people who drive it.”

On how he would rebrand Belltown:

“I’ve found, by living and being in different cities around the world, the richer they are the more nonstop they are. Everybody doesn’t go to bed at 10 o’clock; there’s lots of things happening all the time. Some of those are incredibly good, amazing, wonderful. Some of them are less so.

“As Seattle grows, and as Belltown evolves, we start moving into that fuller cycle where the action is going on all the time..… Part of it is there’s more action, vitality, more restaurants, more places to be; and then there’s the other side of that.

“The more the time gets extended, the more mobile you become. I know. I have to sign on to international conference calls at 4 in the morning, or link to Tokyo at 7 or 8 at night, or look at emails from friends in Europe or the United Arab Emirates at sometime after midnight. There’s so much creative action that’s happening all the time. I think when a city begins to extend its hours it begins to live in international time, which is a more creative way of looking at every waking moment.”

On my suggestion that Nordstrom restore the full name “Brass Plum” for its teen boutique, instead of those now-unfortunate two initials:

“I would totally agree. I worked on the original design program for the Brass Plum identity and signage… I’ve been working as a freelance design consultant to Nordstrom since the ’70s. I think that is a very astute position.”

In yet another example of far-reaching overgeneralizing about contemporary US society (damn there are so many of those), Camille Paglia asserts there’s an epidemic of sex frustration among the white bourgeois—a caste to which a wide swath of Seattle either belongs or aspires.

The essay appears in the NY Times on the day of the Seattle gay pride parade. This does not in any way disprove her thesis, at least as far as it might be applied here.

The Seattle establishment (heart)s gays not because of their sexuality, but in spite of said establishment’s fear of sexuality in general.

Gays are the Seattle powers-that-be’s favorite minority group because they’re so much less “minority-y.” You can be gay and still be an upscale white person. Supporting the gays allows a local company, agency, or institution to proclaim its inclusiveness, without having to examine caste or race inequality.

What’s more, lovin’ the gays allows straight Seattleites to assert their moral superiority over Those People Out There In Evil Mainstream America. We’ve got no bigots here, no siree. We welcome clean-cut people with money no matter what they do in the privacy of their well-appointed homes.

But the great disruptive thing about the pride parade is there’s always someone to crash the party. Someone who takes outness a little more seriously than it’s supposed to be taken. While the official parade attractions were mostly trite (down to the official theme, “Over the Rainbow”), the attendees felt no need to be safely “different.”

There were fully nude men, with paint or see-thru thongs.

There was a young (straight) couple, the female of whom was shirtless, making out on the sidewalk in pure hormonal bliss.

Various clothed boy-boy and girl-girl combos also hugged and kissed a lot. They weren’t settling for public tolerance. They were practicing their love in full view. No pleas or false modesties or passive-aggressive apologies. Just passion, compassion, and shameless lust.

That’s worth more than a hundred guys dressed up as Dorothy standing on bar-sponsored floats.

If you don’t eat meat, don’t put out a book with a subtitle mentioning “…the Meat We Eat.”

This grammatical advice also goes out to all you radical-chic-sters.

“We” means “me and you and maybe more.” It does NOT mean “those stupid mainstream sheeple who aren’t as cool as you and me.”

As we prepare for the 20th anniversary of Twin Peaks, word comes that the  Laura Palmer house is for sale. It’s not in North Bend but Monroe. (Thanx and a hat tip to Seattle Dream Homes.)

As the Elliott Bay Book Co. prepares to leave Pioneer Square a business neighborhood without an “anchor tenant,” the Square’s major retail industry, big rowdy bars, is also in decline. The J&M shuttered altogether (it’s rumored to be reopening under new management as less of a bar and more of a cafe). Others are rumored to be in trouble.

I remember the glory days of the Square’s nightlife scene. I remember that milieu’s signature street sound. You’d stand in front of the pergola around midnight on a Saturday. You could hear, from five different bars, five different white blues bands, each cranking out a mediocre rendition of “Mustang Sally,” each band slightly out of tempo with the others. It was a cacophany only avant-garde composer Charles Ives could have dreamt up.

That scene was already waning before the infamous 2001 Mardi Gras melee gave the Square a bad PR rep.

Fast forward almost a decade. Today’s loci for bigtime drinking are Fremont, Pike/Pine, and especially Belltown.

Belltown’s bar scene has its own signature street sound. It’s the arhythmic clippety-clop of dozens of high-heel shoes trotting up and down the sidewalks of First Avenue. Creating this sound are many small groups of bargoers, small seas of black dresses and perfect hairdos.

These women, and their precursors over the past decade and a half, are the reason Belltown won the bar wars.

In my photo-history book Seattle’s Belltown, I described the rise of the upper First Avenue bar scene:

“After the Vogue proved straight people would indeed come to Belltown to drink and dance, larger, more mainstream nightclubs emerged. Among the first, both on First Avenue, were Casa U Betcha (opened 1989) and Downunder (opened 1991). Both places began on a simple premise: Create an exciting yet comfortable place for image-conscious young women, and the fellows would follow in tow (or in search).”

To this target market, the Square was, and would always be, too dark, too grungy, and too iffy. The condo canyons of Belltown, in contrast, were relatively clean (if still barren) with fresh new buildings and sported (at least some) well-lit sidewalks.

The state liquor laws were liberalized later in the 1990s, leading to more and bigger hard-liquor bars. Casa U Betcha and Downunder gave way to slicker fun palaces, all carefully designed and lit, with fancy drinks at fancy prices to be consumed while wearing fancy out-on-the-town clothes and admiring others doing the same.

And, aside from the occasional Sport, nearly all these joints sought to attract, or at least not to offend, the young-adult female market.

You’re free to make your comparisons here to the high-heeled and well-heeled fashionistas of HBO’s old Sex and the City.

I’d prefer a more local comparison, to Sex In Seattle. In case you don’t know, that’s a live stage show that’s presented 17 installments since 2001. Its heroines are social and career strivers, less materialistic and less “arrived” than the Sex and the City women.

And they’re Asian Americans. As are Sex In Seattle’s writers and producers.

As are a healthy proportion of the clientele at Belltown’s megabars these days.

These customers want many of the same things Belltown residents want. They like attractive, clean, safe streets with well-lit sidewalks.

They may make a little more noise outside than some of the residents want to hear.

But we’re all in the same place, geographically and otherwise.

(Cross posted with the Belltown Messenger.)

The buxom star of the cult movies Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73 is alive and living in Florida, and talking about her childhood in the Jewish ghetto of Nazi occupied Warsaw.

Fimoculous.com’s got a handy link page with dozens of assorted best-ofs and worst-ofs in many fields of endeavor, covering the decade and just the past year.

My favorite individual listing on the thereby-linked lists comes from the Global Language Monitor, which claims that “Politically Correct” has become a politically (in)correct phrase (whatever that means anymore).

There are days when I am glad I don’t promise to comment on every big story out there. This is one of them. After nearly two days, a suspected cop killer was killed by cops. No true justice. No learning. No understanding of why.

No, I STILL don’t have this new site moved back to my old domain name. Every time I try to figure out a tech issue, three more spring up, and I’m just not a code guy.

I’m not the only one who’s noticed that local news is but a small piece of those fiscally endangered local newspapers.

Alex Jones, author of the book Losing the News: The Future of the News that Feeds Democracy, calls original local news content the “iron core” of a newspaper’s info-wares. To use an ’80s ad metaphor, that’s “The Beef;” with sports, comics, wire copy, opinions, and all other non-ad material as the “Big Bun.”

Clay Shirky uses this concept to conclude his old hometown paper in Columbia, MO has, at most, a dozen employees providing the really essential reportage. Therefore, Shirky continues, any nonprofit news entity for a Columbia-sized metro area (in print and/or online) need only subsidize that dozen people’s work. The rest of a newspaper’s product (including local commentary, local arts, and local sports) could be left to live or die by the whim of the free market or the passion of unpaid bloggers.

I, as you might expect, disagree.

As a reader and a scholar of journalism, I believe in the full meal deal. We need the protein of objective reportage, but we also need the fiber of larger cultural/community coverage. We need the starches of punditry and the greens of the arts. And, yes, we need the dessert of humor and entertainment.