In a lot of cases, it was “nice” middle class boys n’ girls powered by alcohol and an anything-goes attitude. In other breaking news, the earth is round.

Up in the land of real health care and real ketchup flavoured potato chips, a few hundred dudes n’ dudettes used the Canucks’ dramatic collapse in the hockey playoffs as an excuse to rip it up in the streets, looting stores and setting cop cars afire.

Initial reports state the fracas may have been larger and more intense than the similar riots following the Canucks’ 1994 playoff defeat, but was contained more quickly.

Of course, Seattle had its own street riot in the 1990s. But ours was about petty things like global politics and trade; nothing this important.

I watched the game, and a little of the postgame riot coverage, at Teddy’s Off Roosevelt, one of Seattle’s major Canuck fan gathering spots. The crowd was noticeably belligerent  during the first period. But as the Boston Bruins expanded their lead, the Canuck contingent became more steadily morose. Drunken despair is just as futile as violent frustration, but can leave fewer cleanup bills and insurance liabilities.

Local bus service around here is largely paid for by local sales taxes.

With the retail crash, those revenues have been hardly hit.

In Snohomish County, Community Transit axed all Sunday and holiday service, and is still fiscally struggling.

One response: Start a PR campaign to encourage taxpayers. Its title: Buy Local for Transit.

You want reliable public transport? Stay away from those online e-tailers. And from those Seattle and Bellevue stores.

And because Community Transit’s taxing district is so weirdly put together, don’t even shop in Everett.

You can go to Lynnwood, Edmonds, Snohomish, and Stanwood. You can shop at Alderwood Mall and the Tulalip outlet mall. All of these send a few sub-percentage points into CT’s operations.

Of course, if you really want to keep the buses running, you could buy a car. But that would be sort of beside the point.

…and Sherman Alexie defends writers’ right to depict these hells, both realistically and metaphorically.

The next historic Seattle building to be threatened isn’t a funky little structure in the way of some massive retail/residential complex. It’s Harborview Hall, a gorgeous 1931 Art Deco tower, part of the original Harborview Medical Center complex. King County wants to raze the 10-story landmark and replace it with a flat plaza. I’ve heard worse civic planning ideas, but not recently.

The Honeymooners writer and Get Smart! producer would be worth a long obit just for his TV and film work. But he also created the Mad Libs books, and cofounded Price/Stern/Sloan Publishing to put them out. The company became a huge supplier of point-of-sale minibooks.

You may now tell your own jokes about fill-in-the-blanks obituary articles.

A Forbes.com story about lawyer/author/TV pundit Lisa Bloom asks the musical question,

How did women go from caring about the Equal Pay Act and Title IX to celebu-tainment and Botox, and what can we do about it?

Whenever I read such all encompassing remarks about “women,” I always respond, at least to myself: WHICH women?

There have always been women who translated their personal concerns and needs into society-wide issues.

And there have always been women who consumed escapist entertainment.

And, yes, there have even been those who did both.

Last November, Capitol Hill resident Ferdous Ahmed appeared in a full page photograph in City Arts magazine. He was dressed to the proverbial nines in a vintage black suit, top hat, sunglasses, and high-top boots, accessorized with a gold pocket watch.

A lifelong vintage-wear fan and collector, Ahmed had just opened a boutique on East Olive Way the month before. It specialized in outfitting “steampunk” afficianados in suitably outlandish retro costumery, with garments and accessories mixed and matched from assorted real-world times and places (though mostly of a Victorian sensibility).

Ahmed’s boutique, Capitol Hill Vaudeville, is gone now.

The Solara Building, where the store had been, is mostly vacated (except for a tattoo studio). Entrepreneurs Shanon Thorson and Laura Olson (the team behind Po Dog on Union Street and the Grim bar on 11th Avenue), in partnership with Alex Garcia (Emerson Salon, Banyan Branch Marketing), are turning the place into The Social, a mammoth (3,000 square feet) gay bar and restaurant. Construction crews are now reshaping the building’s interior to sport a dining room and at least four semi-detached bar areas.

Olson and her partners are keeping the tattoo studio on the premises during the construction period, and say they want to bring back some of the building’s other former tenants (including a hair salon and a role-playing game store) in its peripheral spaces.

Ahmed’s boutique, though, might not get invited back. It was just getting off the ground as a business when it got sent packing. Harem, another clothing shop that had been in the Solara (and had previously been in its own storefront on Broadway), is definitely not returning; owner Victoria Landis has held her liquidation sale and is moving on.

Two features had made the Solara ideal for merchants like Landis and Ahmed.

The first was the interior flexibility of its main floor. It featured a big open space, where the gaming store could hold tournaments and the boutiques could hold fashion shows and receptions, without having to pay full time for the extra square footage.

The second was the relatively low rent. None of the Solara’s tenants had its own street-facing storefront. Without this means to attract casual foot traffic, in a building that was already set back from the street by a small parking strip, the tenants had to draw their clientele with clever promotion to identifiable niche markets. The building’s low rents were priced accordingly, to allow these specialty destination spaces to exist.

But a couple of alt-fashion boutiques and a gaming parlor just can’t bring in the kind of money a destination restaurant, and especially a bar/nightclub, can potentially generate.

Thus, the Hill is getting a new, high profile gay club. Olive Way, in particular, is getting another stop on what’s quickly shaping up as the Hill’s next major bar-crawling scene.

And we’re losing an experiment in providing urban spaces for highly specialized retail, the first experiment of its kind here since the Seattle Independent Mall (on East Pike a decade ago.)

Any “artistic” neighborhood needs some cheaper spaces within its mix. Spaces where the unexpected can happen, where new subcultures can form, where new concepts can germinate.

I was reminded of this when I read the University of Washington Press’s new essay collection Seattle Geographies. One of its longer chapters is entitled “Queering Gay Space.”

The chapter’s authors (Michael Brown, Sean Wang, and Larry Knopp) noted that Capitol Hill hadn’t always been the region’s gay culture nexus. In the first half of the last century, gay and lesbian bars, cabarets, and residential homes existed, with varying degrees of “out”-ness, mainly in Pioneer Square, plus a few scattered spots throughout the downtown core and in the University District and Queen Anne.

But when gay pride first really took off in the early 1970s, the Boeing Bust had depressed housing prices throughout the region. The Hill’s housing prices were further held back by what the essay’s authors called “white flight and fears of inner-city decay.” That gave the Hill a “large number of affordable apartments and rooms in shared houses,” which “drew young queer baby boomers into the area.”

The Hill’s desirability as a place to live, aided in part by then-low housing costs, helped spur its growth as a place for gay businesses and hangouts; and also as a place for bohemian art, theater, and fashion scenes.

Thus, four decades later, it can sprout a venture as monumental as The Social.

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

A new exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery (that won’t be put on tour) suggests that the European surrealist movement was primarily influenced by Northwest Coast indigenous art.

Just imagine the potential meaning: This place didn’t become “cultured” when big money collectors emerged in the region, buying art works made elsewhere. Great stuff has always been created here.

While Hooters may be gone from Seattle now, there are now several other “breastaurant” chains now serving up sports-bar food via low-cut waitress costumes around the country.

And one of them even uses the name “Twin Peaks,” with no permission from David Lynch (thanks to the vagaries of trademark law).

(Thanx and hat tip to Ronald Holden.)

Most of the Hooters restaurants in Washington, including the Seattle location at south Lake Union, are now closed. The parent company insists it’s not due to any lessened popularity in the chain’s concept. It’s just the matter of a regional franchisee that got into a lawsuit with an unspecified “third party.”

This sort of thing has happened before. Here in the late 1990s, a multistore Burger King franchisee suddenly folded.

Of course this could be an opportunity for some new, all local cleavage-themed restaurant. Perhaps with a neo-burlesque concept. After all, there’s nothing either novel or trademarkable about low-cut waitress costumes. The idea goes back at least as far as the serving wenches in English country inns. (And sometimes the food at Hooters tasted almost as old.)

Went to Thursday night’s big presentation for some Brit architects’ big plans for the post-viaduct Seattle waterfront.

They’re pretty much as I’d feared.

Lots of big, potentially bleak, empty spaces. Lots of monumental “architectural features” and spots for gigantic public art pieces.

Nothing intimate. Nothing human-scale. Nothing quirky. Everything huge and slick and “green” (as in huge-empty-front-lawn green), all reeking of world-class-osity.

(Oh, but the designers would consider putting in “thermal pools,” aka public hot tubs, so we all could touch the water during the cold months.)

I’d rather have Atlantic City (pre-Trump) or Blackpool.

Let’s have a boardwalk (wood, not concrete please). Let’s have a place for buskers and food carts and street artists. Let’s have an (at least seasonal) amusement park pier to fully replace the already mourned Fun Forest. Let’s set aside a budget stage human social/cultural events along the water, even if it means cutting back on the scope of new construction in the project.

I don’t want a waterfront with good taste.

I want a waterfront that tastes good.

Yeah, we’ve all heard the latest anti-Internet rants. It’s turning us into a planet of text-based vidiots, incapable of coherent thought or sustained reading.

I happen to have been online since the days of bulletin boards systems and acoustic coupler modems. And I’m plenty capable of internal reasoning. Enough that I fully believe the latest anti-Internet hype, expressed most ludicly by The Shallows author Nicholas Carr, is essentially a load of hooey.

And it’s nothing new. As Vaughan Bell noted last year at (the formerly locally based) Slate.com, ol’ geezers have been whining about those newfangled media menaces at least since Socrates griped about the written word threatening to destroy the great living tradition of oral teaching.

Besides, there’s something about “the shallows” I absolutely adore.

Much of the intellectual world has, for too many decades now, extolled the virtues of Depth but denied the equally important value that is Breadth. The Internet is a breadth-of-knowledge machine like of which the world has never previously known.

And cross-pollenized learning, the great miscegenation of knowledge across nations and disciplines, is part (perhaps the biggest part) of what this species needs to survive.

The Seattle Art Museum’s free today. It’s part of an annual promotion called International Museum Day.

While you’re there, be sure to see Seattle As Collector. It’s a big exhibition marking the 40th anniversary of the Seattle Arts Commission (now called the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, in a typical case of bureaucratic name inflation).

The exhibit includes more than 120 pieces by nearly every Seattle painting, sculpture, and art-photo legend, from those heady days of the ’70s arts-funding boom to the present.

Imagine! The Seattle freakin’ Art Museum, that New Money monument to world-class-osity, actually displaying (and prominently) works by living local artists! ‘Bout time, I say.

Urban-pundit Witold Rybczynski predicts that when housing construction gets out of its three-year dumps, which it’s just starting to do these days, the homes that will be built will include far fewer “McMansions,” those suburban and exurban monuments to mass-produced exceptionalism and excess.

One reason housing may rebound more slowly than the rest of the economy, Rybczynski notes: A lot of recession-struck households are “doubling up,” with two or even three whole families, or one extended family including adult children, in one house.

Wait a minute: That’s just the sort of household structure that McMansions are actually good for. (Well, that and art communes.)

But there are already more than enough foreclosed or never-occupied McMansions for these uses.

Meanwhile, local urban-development pundit Dan Bertolet (at his own CityTank.org) sings to the apparent end of sprawl and the rise of urban-density development, even in the ‘burbs.