Belltown Messenger - Clark Humphrey's MISC

BLUSTERY MISC WELCOME to a new, hopefully less wind-baggy year.

As this is being written, those of us here in bodacious Belltown have gotten to enjoy the miracle that is underground wiring on the ides of December weekend, while the unfortunates in Wallingford, Seward Park, Bellevue, and more remote points froze in the dark for one or more nights due to the proclivities of several inconsiderate trees to get themselves strewn across power lines. It just goes to show you: There are distinct advantages to living in the middle of civilization.

THIS ISN'T TO SAY there weren't any impacts of Windstorm 2006 in our little corner o' the world. Downtown retailers were blessed/cursed on Dec. 15 with shoppers who couldn't get their gifts at, say, Bellevue Square. Seattle Center, the Aquarium, etc. were stuffed with parents escorting young'uns whose schools had shut down for the day. Hotel lobbies were stuffed with stranded travelers and ordinary folk with no place else to go. Workplaces and holiday parties in town included many women who (needlessly) apologized for the inability to apply their makeup or style their hair in their de-electrified homes. Many who lived in places with power but worked in places without it got an involuntary day off. Restaurants, coffee houses, and bars serviced many customers whose fridges, coffee makers, stoves, etc. had gone phhhfft.

And, perhaps most significantly, Friday was A Day Without Newspapers. The Seattle Times Co.'s suburban plant was blacked out. No Friday P-Is were finished or distributed. A few thousand Times copies made their way to a relative few downtown stores and vending boxes.

Folks who still had the juice at home had to settle for Web sites (including those of the knocked-out newspapers), TV and radio. The disempowered had to be informed by battery radios, car radios, and hand-cranked radios, or by laptops brought to WiFi-enabled coffee houses. (Sidebar: Apparently, the phone lines at KUOW were swamped all weekend by angry callers, justifiably miffed at the station's on-air interviews with folks who offered power-outage survival tips but then rattled off the URLs of Web sites for more information. What, you mean everybody doesn't have a stack of fully-charged backup laptop batteries and a satellite broadband connection?) On Saturday, the local papers came back, but in truncated 36-page editions. That page count would have been enough to provide the regular Saturday Times and P-I "news holes," except that the Times Co. decided to make up some of the money it had lost on Friday, and stuffed both Saturday papers full of ads. In the remaining 12 and a half or so pages, both papers' editors crammed as much storm coverage as they could, leaving little or no space for sports, business news, editorials, comics, TV listings, puzzles, or (oddly ehough) the weather.

By Sunday, the Times plant and product were back to normal. But was the civic discourse fatally disrupted? Would more folks start buying the NY Times just to get assured access to the NYT crossword? Would more readers migrate online and dump the dead-tree editions? Would that aggravate the Times Co.'s drive to kill the P-I? Will mass-market newsprint be more quickly relegated to the great recycle bin of media history? Stay tuned.

BRIEFLY IN OTHER NEWS: We must say goodbye this month to Bud Tutmarc, one of the unsung heroes of Northwest music, who passed away last month. He'd spent most of his career as a church musical director, but in the '50s he'd invented an improved Hawaiian-style pedal steel guitar, one of the key steps toward the electric guitars we know and love today... Apparently the Nintendo Wii, the new video game console with handheld wireless remote controls, can be dangerous in the wrong hands. A Dec. 14 AP dispatch from Seattle reported how local player Janna Baker, during an energetic round of a Wii bowling game, flung her "Wiimote" until it "glanced off her coffee table, snapped its wrist strap, and hurtled into her flat-screen TV." The company's coming out with stronger wrist straps.

BUT THE TOP STORY THIS MONTH can only be the at-long-last release of our newest and loveliest book to date, Vanishing Seattle. If you didn't get it as a holiday gift, treat yourself to it today. Each of its 215 handsome monochrome pix was researched, hand-chosen, and captioned with care. They add up to a 215-faceted portrait of a Seattle that once was, a city of funk and spunk and taste and boundless optimism.

I want readers to see the book as more than a trip down memory lane, a wistful look back at A Simpler Time. It's meant to be a celebration of the old Seattle, and a call to recapture at least some of its spirit.

Hard to believe, but there was a time when almost every Seattle restaurant printed the prices of every item on its menu for all to see-and did so in dollars and cents, not simply two digits and a dot. Locally-owned (or at least locally-managed) stores set fashion trends that sometimes defied those dictated by the national magazines. Local DJs promoted local rock bands on commercial top-40 radio. Local TV newscasts dared to devote whole minutes to "talking heads" discussing politics and other nonviolent topics.

Other personality traits of Seattle's past self are more subtle. There was a spirit, a feeling that Things Could Be Done. A real city, with all bells and whistles, could be carved out of recently-conquered wilderness. We could build our own businesses, make our own art, think up our own ideas. Later, the feminist and civil-rights movements added new dimensions to this can-do attitude.

This stance went hand-in-hand with a self-effacing sense of humor. The old Seattle had writers (Betty Anderson, Emmett Watson), cartoonists (Bob Cram, Lynda Barry), and broadcasters (Bob Hardwick, Stan Boreson) who blended unpretentious whimsey and clever wit. The old Seattle was a place more interested in living a good life than in amassing ever-bigger piles of Stuff. It was a place with a working waterfront, not a "Harbour Pointe."

It's that spirit I want to help bring back. And, in the old Seattle mindset, I believe we can.

(Get your own copy of Vanishing Seattle today at a store near you or at miscmedia.com.)