MISC IS DEDICATED THIS MONTH to Bob Bogle, Ventures founding guitarist and NW rock legend. His band got into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame just last year. His distinctively crisp, cool instrumental sound is eternal.
ALL CONGRATS and best wishes to top local music producer Conrad Uno (Young Fresh Fellows, PUSA, and more). He and his lovely bride Emily Bishton renewed their wedding vows at Safeco Field one recent Sunday. The Seattle Times article and the KING/KOMO TV stories about the event mentioned almost nothing about Uno’s musical career.

Micheal Jackson, R.I.P.: The ultimate tabloid celebrity was also the ultimate mess of contradictions, as you’ve long known. He was a devout student of classic R&B who had a series of nose and chin reconstructions, straightened his hair, and wore whiteface makeup on and off stage. He was a self-made sex symbol whose mark of “toughness” was to shriek in an attempt to reach the high notes of his early fame. He was a creator of effortless-sounding music whose life was rife with chaos, drug/alcohol abuse, and music-industry sycophants. He was a beloved entertainer who was accused of some of the most heinous crimes. He’d attained unlimited wealth (or the closest thing to that any African-American man has ever had), then spent the last third of his life scrambling to avoid total financial collapse. My favorite quotation about Jackson came in a Facebook message from ex-Seattle semiotician Steven Shaviro: “MJ, in his musical genius and in his sad racial and sexual confusions, epitomized American civilization more than anybody else ever did.”

FARRAH FAWCETT R.I.P.: Celebrity can be a fickle thing. So can typecasting. Fawcett was only on Charlie’s Angels for one season, 22 episodes (plus a three-episode return in the show’s fourth season). Yet that one role, and the accompanying glamour-image marketing, established her celebrity persona for life. From serious film roles to two Playboy appearances, nothing she did since overcame that initial inconography of the nipples, the teeth, and especially the hair. Only her slow, very public death did that.

WASHINGTON HALL IS SAVED!: The historic Central District meeting hall, known in recent decades as the original home of On the Boards’ performance-art events, now belongs to Historic Seattle. A big restoration/renovation will begin shortly.

BELLTOWN’S BUILDING BOOM may be on pause, but that’s not stopping landowners from greasing the legal wheels in hopes of future development projects. Just last month, the City said owners of the former Bon Marche livery stables on Western could go ahead and tear down the 101-year-old clapboard structure, should they ever choose to do so.

Besides being a relic of the horse-drawn-delivery days, and one of the last buildings its age remaining in greater downtown, it’s also one of Belltown’s last buildings containing real artist spaces. (Note: In this column, architectural offices are not considered to be “artist spaces.”) It was in that building that I spent much of the 1994-95 winter and spring in Art Chantry’s former graphic design studio, assembling my book Loser.

SEATTLE TIMES SHRINKAGE WATCH: Recent Sunday papers have been down to 76 pages (plus ad flyers, supplements, and comics). Weekday papers in recent months have had as few as 26 pages. (That’s not the “news hole;” that’s the whole paper, ads and all.)

I’m not calling this feature a “death watch,” because the Times still has a lot further down it could go.
As yet, no major US city has lost all its daily papers. None probably will, at least not altogether. (Ann Arbor, MI’s paper is shrinking from seven days to two this summer.)

But the papers that remain could become unrecognizable. They could become tiny journals of record, like slightly more mass-market versions of the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce. They could become glorified pundit-newsletters promoting the local business community’s agenda of the day. They could become, to borrow from the old National Lampoon Sunday Newspaper Parody, “newscasts in print,” lurid sheets emphasizing crimes, fires, and mayhem.

THE KARNAGE KONTINUES: Back in the days of vinyl and even beyond, the University District was the record-store capitol of the region. That’s where such once-mighty industry players as Budget Tapes & Records, Discount Records, Tower, Peaches, and The Wherehouse all purveyed the big (later little) plastic discs bearing assorted types of beautiful noise.

That era ended last month when the District’s last specialty new music store, Cellophane Square, gave up the good fight it had fought since 1972.

At its original location on NE 42nd, and later in more spacious digs on upper University Way, Cellophane Square was a lot more than a retailer. It was a community center, a hangout, an information exchange.

This was particularly true during the 1979-91 era of the punk underground, when Seattle’s civic cultural establishment sneered at any musical act younger or flashier than the Eagles. Cellophane Square was where we learned which bands were touring, which bands were breaking up, and which bands needed a new drummer. It was where we got the domestic zines and the UK music mags. It was where we got those oh-so-rare (even then!) import-only releases by American bands.

There will still be a few new CDs at the University Book Store, and a lot of used discs at 2nd Time Around. But the scene just won’t be the same.

CAN YOU DIG IT?: SeattlePI.com’s Joel Connelly doesn’t like the idea of all the street construction Belltown’s got this spring and summer. He worries that all these closed traffic lanes and parking spaces could fatally disrupt business—especially if Nickels’s “park boulevard” idea (reducing Bell Street to one lane of traffic and plaza-izing the rest) goes through.

To some extent, the city’s had to make the work as disruptive as it’s been. Especially on Fourth, where there were only a brief few weeks between the start of the traditional local dry season and the Gay Pride Parade.
And I believe if Bell’s gonna be revamped, it might as well be done now, while all this other work is already going on on or near it. Besides, it’s our best (only?) opportunity to give Belltown a collective back yard. (We’ve already got a collective front lawn, the Olympic Sculpture Park.)