Turns out I’m not the only one who’s become fascinated by old blank signs.

…rhetorically ponders whether the construction of ultra-luxury residences and offices behind the facades of old buildings is really historic preservation:

“Market capitalism has a special way of producing an illusion of adaptation when a community senses something lacking in a world filled with alleged choices. You want a piece of history? Fine, tell us how we can fettishize it and sell it back to you for a profit, and you can have all of the rustic brick you want. We’ve got truckloads.”

…and gloom in past few posts, here’s something upbeat–quaint film footage of Seattle in the 1930s, shot by amateur filmmaker Iwao Matsushita. Too bad he couldn’t stay in town past 12/7/41.

…today’s overall downbeat theme, Belltown’s own legendary rock venue the Crocodile Cafe is going through a fiscal rough spot. Apparently it’s been, at best, only marginally profitable the past seven years, as newer and bigger venues compete for the top touring bands. But since founder Stephanie Dorgan’s divorce earlier this year from R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, there’s no longer rock-star zillions to plow into the place. Managers say business has rebounded a bit the past few months, but the Croc’s long-term future remains to be seen.

…Joe Martin (not to be confused with the All My Children patriarch) delivers a terrific speech to a “Building the Political Will to End Homelessness” conference. Martin’s topics include America’s need for a “theology of hope” that would combine compassion with effective action.

Meanwhile, Real Change has run “A Seattle Manifesto,” Tim Harris’s call for more social justice and less demographic cleansing.

As you might have heard, longtime Seattle historian/activist/political operative Walt Crowley passed away Friday at age 59.

I’d known he was going in for a second round of cancer surgery this week, after having already lost his larynx in February. He suffered a massive stroke while recovering from this latest operation. Despite already being in Virginia Mason Medical Center at the time of the stroke, physicians could do nothing for him.

The last time I’d seen him was three or four weeks ago. He’d shown up at the Two Bells with some longtime friends. He conversed with me by writing on an Etch-A-Sketch-like children’s erasable screen he carried on a necklace. I agreed to consider producing a book for his HistoryInk, the print arm of HistoryLink, the massive nonprofit local-history web site he’d cofounded. (I’d already written a couple of small essays for the site.)

I’d also been to some of Crowley’s legendary Christmas Eve house parties. I remember at one of them insistantly telling a woman Crowley’s age that no, people like myself who were too young to be “From The Late Sixties” were people too. Crowley himself, bless him, had no problem with that novel concept.

I’d first met Crowley in the late 1980s, around the same time he was serving as a dueling commentator on KIRO-TV with another former acquaintance of mine, John Carlson. Around this time, Crowley boasted of having personally saved the Bill of Rights in his Belltown apartment, by forming a committee to stop the Washington State Legislature from going along with a Reagan-era right-wing drive for a new Constitutional convention.

A scion of the Crowley Maritime tugboat family (though he didn’t like to mention it), Walt first gained citywide attention as a hippie-era activist, spokesperson, journalist, and cofounder of the underground paper Helix. He remained socially and politically active all his life. He worked in various capacities for various local Democrats, and once lost his own race for a City Council seat. He served on countless boards and committees. He was big in the drives to save the Paramount and Moore theaters, the Eagles Auditorium (now A Contemporary Theater), and the Blue Moon Tavern.

But like all too many of his and subsequent “rebel” generations, his antagonisms against conservatives never quite extended to that quintessential conservative big business, the tobacco business. In recent years his powerful, fun-loving voice became a raspy whisper, before it disappeared altogether.

Crowley will be remembered by many people, online and in print, over the coming days and weeks. Let me simply remember him as one of Seattle’s most important keepers of history, as well as an historic figure himself.

Here are further thoughts by two Crowley friends, Michael Hood and (in the comments) Patrick McRoberts.

And here’s Crowley’s official bio on HistoryLink.

From here to the bigtime mainstream media, everybody loves the South Lake Union Streetcar’s new unofficial nickname, South Lake Union Trolley. Or rather, they love its juicy acronym.

And who wouldn’t love the SLUT?

Particularly since the acronym’s just so darned appropriate for a mini-transit system “railroaded” into existence by Paul Allen’s lobbying, whilst plans that would move more people thru more populous places (can you say Mo-no-rail?) get slowly hacked to death?

I expect all of you to be wearing your official unofficial SLUT T-shirts on the line’s opening day in December. Heck, you could even wear ’em at this coming Monday’s reopening of the downtown bus tunnel, another of Seattle’s under-two-miles transportation non-solutions.

I haven’t mentioned it much here, but I’ve been admiring the online scribblings of HorsesAss.org’s David “Goldy” Goldstein. Most recently, he’s lucidly compared the totally-made-up faux-controversy over a newspaper advertisement with the classic play/movie Betrayal.

…(other than Canadian editions of U.S. mags) delineates “How George Bush Became the New Saddam.”

…a Courtney Love-branded perfume? Even she’s not so sure.

In my early years, motels and hotels in Western Washington would advertise “Canadian Money Accepted At Par.” Nowadays, everybody will be doing that, since both countries’ bucks are of equal value.

…the rhetorical question of whether Americans are all now living within someone’s insane delusions.

Without making a big PR fuss about it, KIRO-TV’s quietly moved into high-definition local production. Last night’s prime-time documentary special, Cold Facts About Our Warm Planet, was particularly notable.

With lush HD videography and few commercial interruptions, it showed the local effects of global warming. We saw shrinking glaciers, prematurely melting mountain snowpacks, tinder-dry forest lands, declining salmon runs, potential sea-level rises, and more.

It was all narrated by a low-key Steve Raible. (How’d he grow up so smart, when his fellow early Seahawks star Steve Largent went wingutty?) Raible calmly took us through the evidence and the arguments about our current warming trend. He explained the background science, with the help of UW scientists and experts.

Raible stayed away from casting blame or judgmentalism, and rightly so. If global warming really is influenced by human activity, and I believe it is, it’s taken the entirety of human civilization to get us there. Anti-SUV sanctimony won’t save the planet. That can only occur with a lot of big and small steps by a lot of people, including people whose current lifestyles are different from yours.

Kudos to Cold Facts’ writer-director Ben Saboonchian and videographer Peter Frerichs.

I don’t know if or when the station will repeat the special. It should, and it should put the whole doc up online.

My ol’ emo/folkie musician pals Gary Heffern and Chris Eckman (the latter from the Walkabouts), most of whose recordings have only been issued by Glitterhouse Records in Germany, have released their first domestically-distributed music in years. Appropriately enough, it’s a track (called “Wave”) on
Song of America, a three-CD box set compiling new versions of classic American tunes, from “Lakota Dream Song” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” to “I Am Woman” and “Streets of Philadelphia.”

The mastermind behind this master mix? None other than America’s last law-abiding chief lawyer, Janet Reno. (No, unlike her immediate successor, she doesn’t pretend to sing.)

Attended the Washington News Council’s panel discussion at the downtown library Monday evening, entitled “Today’s News: A ‘Webolution’ in Progress.”

The six panelists came from different corners of journalism/commentary (Cory Bergman of KING-TV, Robert Hernandez of the Seattle Times, Josh Feit of the Stranger, Alex Johnson of MSNBC, Chuck Taylor of Crosscut, and Joan “McJoan” McCarter from Daily Kos). The moderator, Merrill Brown, used to work for MSNBC and was now with a Vancouver-based “citizen journalism” site, NowPublic.

But all seven of them are nowadays competing for the hearts, minds, and eyeballs of you, the online reader.

As one who’s seen this medium (or, as one panelist called it, a “distribution vehicle” that can carry umpteen different types of media) grow, I must confess I didn’t learn much I didn’t already know, and didn’t hear many arguments I hadn’t already heard. Buzzwords included: “Aggregation” (i.e., links to stories on other sites), “user generated content” (i.e., unpaid bloggers and videographers), “the end of the news cycle” (i.e., posting new content all the time), the supposed last days of print newspapers (someone suggested that some papers might not last another decade; I say we’re more likely to see some suburban and JOA papers fade out, but local monopoly papers in major markets would decline far more slowly).

The one real disagreement came when an audience member asked how these different organizations would reach out to under-40 readers. The Times guy mentioned recruiting teen volunteer bloggers from the Vera Project to cover rock shows at Bumbershoot. Crosscut’s Taylor, being the ever-dutiful David Brewster acolyte, scoffed at the very idea of needing anything to do with them pesky kids. The Stranger’s Feit gave the loveably cocky reply that his outfit already owns the advertiser-beloved young demographic; it’s built into everything they do. MSNBC.com’s Johnson had the best answer: He’s got a genuine 26-year-old single woman running the afternoon editor’s desk.

You’ll be able to view the whole thing on the state-owned cable channel TVW sometime in the coming weeks.